Un poeta de guerra es un poeta que participa en una guerra y escribe sobre sus experiencias, o un no combatiente que escribe poemas sobre la guerra. Si bien el término se aplica especialmente a los que sirvió durante la Primera Guerra Mundial , [1] el término se puede aplicar a un poeta de cualquier escrito nacionalidad sobre cualquier guerra, incluyendo Homer 's Ilíada , de todo el siglo octavo antes de Cristo, así como poesía de la Guerra Civil Americana , la Guerra Civil Española , la Guerra de Crimea y otras guerras.
El antiguo Testamento
El Libro de los Salmos contiene muchas obras de poesía hebrea sobre la guerra, muchas de las cuales se atribuyen al rey David , el segundo monarca del Reino de Israel , que se dice que reinó c. 1010–970 a. C.
La historia del ascenso de David de pastor a rey también inspiró la Davidiad , que es un poema épico heroico de 1517 en latín renacentista del abogado, juez y humanista renacentista Marko Marulić , que pasó su vida en Split, Croacia , que estaba bajo el gobierno de la República de Venecia .
Además de las porciones pequeñas que intentan recordar las epopeyas de Homer , de Marulic El Davidiad está fuertemente modelada sobre Virgilio 's Eneida . Este es tanto el caso que los contemporáneos de Marulić lo llamaron el "Christian Virgil de Split ". El difunto filólogo serbio-estadounidense Miroslav Marcovich también detectó "la influencia de Ovidio , Lucano y Estacio " en la obra.
Marulić también escribió el poema épico Judita , que vuelve a contar los acontecimientos del Libro de Judith , al tiempo que describe sutilmente a los soldados del Imperio asirio como el equivalente precristiano de los jenízaros turcos y hace múltiples referencias y alusiones a la mitología clásica . El poema contiene 2126 dodecasilabo líneas, con cesura después de la sexta sílaba, compuestas en seis libros ( libar s). La base lingüística del libro es el dialecto Split o Čakavian, el léxico Štokavian , combinado con muchas palabras de la antigua traducción al eslavo eclesiástico de la Biblia cristiana . Judita presagia así la creación del croata moderno .
La guerra de Troya
La Ilíada
La Ilíada es un poema épico en hexámetro dactílico que se cree que fue compuesto por Homero , un bardo griego ciegode Jonia , un distrito cerca de Izmir en la Turquía moderna.
La Ilíada está emparejada con su secuela, la Odisea , que también se atribuye a Homero. Juntas, ambas epopeyas se encuentran entre las obras más antiguas que se conservan de la literatura occidental y se cree que comenzaron como literatura oral . La primera forma escrita generalmente se remonta al siglo VIII a. C. [2] En la versión estándar aceptada, el texto de la Ilíada contiene 15.693 líneas y está escrito en griego homérico , un idioma literario derivado de la mezcla del griego jónico con otros dialectos del griego antiguo .
La Ilíada se desarrolla durante el asedio de diez años de la polis de Troya ( Ilium ), gobernada por el rey Príamo y sus hijos Héctor y París , por un ejército masivo de una coalición de estados griegos liderados por el rey Agamenón de Micenas .
Aunque la historia cubre solo unas pocas semanas en el último año de la guerra, la Ilíada menciona o alude a muchas de las leyendas griegas sobre el asedio; los eventos anteriores, como la reunión de guerreros para el asedio, la causa de la guerra y preocupaciones relacionadas tienden a aparecer cerca del comienzo. Además, los dioses griegos no solo observan la guerra a medida que avanza, sino que intervienen activamente en nombre de los mortales a quienes favorecen.
La epopeya comienza con la invocación de Homero a Calíope , la de las Nueve Musas responsables de inspirar tanto la elocuencia como la poesía épica . Homero luego relata una pelea por una mujer entre Agamenón y el guerrero y semidiós Aquiles . Solo la intervención divina de su patrona Atenea evita que Aquiles mate a Agamenón en el acto. Aquiles, sin embargo, se retira a su tienda, prometiendo no salir hasta que Agamenón se disculpe.
Al final, el asesinato de su amigo Patroclo por Héctor saca a Aquiles de su tienda con la intención de luchar contra Héctor hasta la muerte. Después de una batalla salvaje y brutal, Aquiles mata a Héctor y profana repetidamente su cadáver. Pero después de que Príamo entra en su tienda y suplica la devolución del cuerpo de su hijo, Aquiles cede y permite que Príamo lleve los restos de Héctor al interior de las murallas de la ciudad.
Los ritos funerarios de Héctor y la cremación de su cuerpo en una pira funeraria se relatan en detalle.
Aunque la narración épica termina justo en este punto, antes de la inminente muerte de Aquiles a manos del hermano de Héctor, París, y la caída de Troya, estos eventos están prefigurados y aludidos de manera bastante vívida. Por lo tanto, cuando La Ilíada llega a su fin, Homero ha contado la historia completa de la Guerra de Troya.
Posthomerica
Los eventos entre la cremación de Héctor y la caída de Troya se amplían en el poema épico Posthomerica del siglo IV , de Quinto de Esmirna . Sus materiales son tomados de los poemas cíclicos de la que Virgilio 's Eneida también Drew, en particular, el Etiópida ( Coming de Memnon ) y la Iliupersis ( destrucción de Troya ) de Arctino de Mileto , el ahora perdido- Heleneis de Philodoppides y la Ilias Mikra ( Pequeña Ilíada ) de Lesches . [3] El trabajo de Quintus está inspirado en Homero. Durante mucho tiempo, la obra de Quinto se consideró inferior a la de Homero; sin embargo, ahora se comprende cuán inventiva y creativamente está respondiendo Quinto a la epopeya homérica. [4]
Persia preislámica
Ayadgar-i Zariran
Aunque se desconoce su autor, Ayadgar-i Zariran, que significa "Memorial de Zarer", es un poema de guerra que fue conservado por sacerdotes zoroástricos después de la conquista musulmana de Persia . En su forma manuscrita sobreviviente, "El Memorial de Zarer" representa una de las primeras obras sobrevivientes de la literatura iraní y el único poema épico sobreviviente en Pahlavi . [5] Históricamente, los poemas épicos iraníes como este fueron compuestos y cantados por juglares viajeros, que en la época preislámica y zoroastriana eran un elemento fijo de la sociedad iraní. [6] [7]
El poema de unas 346 líneas es una historia de la muerte en la batalla del héroe mítico Zarer (< Avestan Zairivairi ), y de la venganza posterior por su muerte. Las figuras y eventos de la historia del poema amplían los personajes y eventos mitológicos a los que se alude en los Gathas , [5] que son los himnos autobiográficos que se atribuyen al profeta Zoroastro .
La historia del Memorial de Zarer tiene lugar mucho antes de la dinastía aqueménida fue fundada por Ciro el Grande y durante el tiempo mitológico de la Kayanid monarca Wishtasp , el patrón y protector del profeta Zoroastro . La historia comienza con la llegada de mensajeros a la corte de Wishtasp. El mensaje es del rey adorador de daeva de los khyonas no iraníes (
Aunque Wishtasp ha recibido estas nuevas enseñanzas de la deidad creadora Ahura Mazda a través de Zoroaster , Arjasp exige además que Wishtasp vuelva a ser de la misma religión que él. Arjasp amenaza a Wishtasp con una guerra brutal si se niega a someterse.
Zarer, que es el hermano de Wishtap y el comandante en jefe del ejército de Wishtasp, escribe una respuesta en la que se rechazan las demandas de Arjasp y se selecciona un lugar para la batalla. En preparación para la batalla, el ejército de los iraníes crece tanto que "el ruido de la caravana del país de Irán subió al cielo y el ruido de las espadas en movimiento subió al infierno ". El primer ministro de Wishtasp, Jamasp (
El hijo de 7 años de Zarer, Bastwar / Bestoor (
Posteriormente, Bastwar es nombrado sucesor de su padre como comandante en jefe y recibe la mano de la hija de Wishtasp, Homai, en matrimonio.
Shahnameh
Ferdowsi 's del siglo 11 Shâhnameh ( 'Libro de los Reyes') vuelve a contar la mítica y en cierta medida el pasado histórico del imperio persa desde la creación del mundo hasta la conquista musulmana en el siglo séptimo. Es uno de los poemas épicos más largos del mundo creado por un solo poeta y la epopeya nacional del Gran Irán . Ferdowsi es célebre como una de las figuras más influyentes de la literatura persa y una de las más importantes de la historia de la literatura . [10] El Shahnameh también contiene muchas obras de poesía de guerra.
De acuerdo con Nueva formalista poeta y profesor Dick Davis , que ha traducido toda la épica de Ferdowsi en Inglés, el lamento sobre la conquista musulmana por el antiguo poeta de la corte de Yazdegerd III , el último Zoroastriano Rey de Reyes , sigue siendo un poema emblemático dentro de la literatura iraní y la cultura y todavía se cita como una crítica a los líderes políticos que se considera que están gobernando mal al pueblo iraní .
Las guerras entre galeses y sajones
Rey Arturo
El influyente awdl de Thomas Gwynn Jones , Ymadawiad Arthur ("El fallecimiento de Arturo") [11], retrata las últimas horas del rey Arturo con su compañero Bedwyr desde la muerte de Medrawd en la batalla de Camlann hasta la partida final de Arturo hacia Afallon .
El poema, según Hywel Teifi Edwards , "trajo de vuelta algo de la grandeza mitopoyética que John Morris-Jones anhelaba. Más que eso, hizo de Bedwyr , el caballero encargado por Arturo para arrojar la gran espada Excalibur al lago, un prototipo del galés del siglo XX que, de generación en generación, armado sólo con una visión del valor de su cultura, lucha por su supervivencia contra un materialismo devorador. Bedwyr, angustiado por la catástrofe que temía que cayera sobre su indefenso país, debería él obedece la orden de Arthur, es una de las figuras más conmovedoras de la literatura galesa . Si se le niega la seguridad de un arma incomparable, la última prueba tangible de la fuerza sobrenatural de Arthur, debe seguir luchando solo con su fe en el prometido regreso de Arthur de Afalon para sostener él." [12]
A diferencia de muchas obras de poesía inglesa , francesa y alemana inspiradas en la leyenda artúrica , Ymadawiad Arthur hace frecuentes referencias a la literatura galesa y a la mitología galesa de la Mabinogion , y se cree que deriva su flujo narrativo del cuidadoso estudio de Jones de esa misma fuente. . [13] [14] William Beynon Davies considera además a Ymadawiad Arthur como una obra de poesía sutilmente cristiana basada en sus muchos paralelos bíblicos , ya que el Rey Arturo se parece en algunos aspectos al Mesías y en otros al Siervo Sufriente . [15]
El poema le valió a su autor la Cátedra Bardic en el National Eisteddfod en 1902.
JRR Tolkien 's poema épico La caída de Arthur , escrito en aliterativo verso y dejó sin terminar en el momento de la muerte de Tolkien en 1973, representa el rey Arturo como Welsh Rey que ha estado luchando contra la invasión anglo-sajona de Gran Bretaña .
La batalla de Catraeth
La obra maestra fundamental de la poesía galesa , Y Gododdin , cuenta cómo Mynyddog Mwynfawr , el rey de Gododdin en Hen Ogledd , convocó a guerreros de varios otros reinos galeses y les proporcionó un festín de un año en su salón de hidromiel en Din Eidyn (ahora el sitio de Castillo de Edimburgo en Escocia). Luego, en el 600 d.C., después de asistir a misa y confesión, Mynyddog los dirigió en una campaña contra los anglosajones que culminó con la Batalla de Catraeth (que se cree que se libró en Catterick en North Yorkshire). Después de varios días de luchar contra adversidades abrumadoras, Mynyddog y casi todos sus guerreros murieron.
El manuscrito contiene varias estrofas que no tienen conexión con Y Gododdin y se consideran interpolaciones. Una estrofa en particular ha recibido atención porque compara a uno de los guerreros caídos con el Rey Arturo . Esta, si no es una interpolación posterior, sería la primera referencia conocida al personaje.
Welsh Bard Aneirin , quien se cree que es el autor, también estuvo presente en la Batalla de Catraeth y fue uno de los únicos dos a cuatro sobrevivientes galeses. Aneirin permaneció cautivo hasta que Ceneu ap Llywarch Hen pagó su rescate .
Y Gododdin ha sobrevivido en un solo manuscrito, el Libro de Aneirin del siglo XIII.
La batalla de Brunanburh
La batalla de Brunanburh se libró en 937 entre un ejército dirigido por Æthelstan , rey anglosajón de Inglaterra y su hermano Edmund Atheling y un ejército aliado dirigido por Olaf Guthfrithson , el rey hiberno-nórdico de Dublín ; Constantino II, rey de Escocia , y Owain ap Dyfnwal , el rey galés de Strathclyde . La batalla resultó en una abrumadora victoria del rey Æthelstan.
Según Egil's Saga de Snorri Sturluson , el antihéroe de la saga , el berserker , hechicero y poeta islandés Egill Skallagrímsson luchó en la batalla como un soldado mercenario de élite del rey Æthelstan. También se dice que Egill compuso una drápa en honor al Rey, que se cita en su totalidad en el texto de la Saga.
La batalla de Brunanburh también se celebra con un poema en inglés antiguo del mismo nombre en la Crónica anglosajona , que en 1880 fue traducido al inglés moderno, en una mezcla métrica de troquesas y dáctilos , por Alfred Tennyson .
Conquista musulmana de Armenia
La epopeya nacional de Armenia , Sasna Tsrer ( Temerarios de Sassoun ), se desarrolla durante la época de la invasión de Armenia por el Califato de Bagdad (alrededor de 670), y se centra en la resistencia de cuatro generaciones dentro de la misma familia, que culmina con El héroe popular armenio David de Sasun expulsa a los invasores musulmanes de Armenia . [dieciséis]
Fue recopilado y escrito de la tradición oral por el P. Garegin Srvandztiants , sacerdote célibe de la Iglesia Apostólica Armenia , en 1873. La epopeya se publicó por primera vez en Constantinopla en 1874. Es más conocida como Sasuntsi Davit (" David de Sasun ").
Seis décadas más tarde, Manuk Abeghian , un estudioso de la literatura y el folclore armenios prestó un servicio casi igualmente valioso al recopilar casi las cincuenta variantes de la epopeya en tres volúmenes académicos publicados por la Editorial Estatal de Ereván , Armenia soviética en 1936, 1944 (parte l) y 1951 (parte ll), bajo el título general Daredevils of Sasun . Como las transcripciones están en varios dialectos, lo que presenta muchas dificultades para el lector moderno, se reformuló la historia y se adoptó un estilo bastante uniforme comprensible para los hablantes y lectores de armenio oriental .
Los tres volúmenes contienen más de 2500 páginas de texto. En 1939 se publicó un texto recopilado que entretejía la mayoría de los episodios importantes para su lectura popular bajo el título "David de Sasun". Desde 1939 hasta 1966 todas las traducciones se hicieron a partir de este texto popularizado.
En 1964, Leon Zaven Surmelian , un poeta armenio-estadounidense , sobreviviente y autor de memorias del genocidio armenio , eligió una narrativa de todas las versiones grabadas, tradujo la epopeya al inglés y la publicó con el nombre de Daredevils of Sassoun . En su introducción, Surmelian criticó duramente las versiones literarias de la epopeya publicada en la Armenia soviética . Surmelian denunció, entre muchas otras cosas, el hecho de que, debido tanto al ateísmo estatal como a la censura en la Unión Soviética , "se minimiza el elemento religioso". [17]
Durante una visita a Ereván antes de la publicación de su tratamiento en los Estados Unidos de América, Surmelian expresó estas opiniones a un escritor y profesor armenio soviético, quien respondió con una sonrisa: "Podemos traducir su versión en inglés al armenio". [18]
Edad vikinga
Egill Skallagrímsson
Según Egil's Saga de Snorri Sturluson , el antihéroe de la saga , el berserker , hechicero y poeta islandés Egill Skallagrímsson libró una disputa de sangre que duró muchos años contra el rey Eiríkr Bloodaxe y la reina Gunnhildr.
La enemistad comenzó cuando, después de ser gravemente insultado, Egill mató a Bárðr de Atley, un criado de Eirikr y pariente de Gunhildr. Hirviendo de odio, Gunnhildr ordenó a sus dos hermanos, Eyvindr Braggart y Álfr Aksmann, que asesinaran a Egill y a su hermano Þórólfr, que hasta ese momento habían estado en buenos términos con ella. Sin embargo, Egill mató a los hermanos de la Reina cuando intentaron enfrentarse a él.
El verano siguiente, el padre de Eirkr, el rey Haraldr Fairhair , murió. Para asegurar su lugar como único rey de Noruega, Eiríkr Bloodaxe asesinó a dos de sus propios hermanos y declaró a Egill un forajido en Noruega. Berg-Önundr reunió a un grupo para capturar a Egill, pero Egill lo mató mientras se " resistía al arresto ". Antes de dejar Noruega, Egill también mató a Rögnvaldr, el hijo del rey Eiríkr y la reina Gunnhildr. Luego maldijo al Rey y a la Reina colocando una vara del Nithing y diciendo
- "Aquí establezco un níð -pole, y declaro este níð contra el rey Eiríkr y la reina Gunnhildr" - giró la cabeza del caballo para mirar hacia el continente - "Declaro este níð a los espíritus de la tierra allí, y la tierra misma , para que todos se extravíen, para no retener ni encontrar su lugar, no hasta que saquen al Rey Eiríkr y Gunnhildr de la tierra ". Colocó el poste de níð en el acantilado y lo dejó en pie; se enfrentó a los ojos del caballo en la tierra, y talló runas en el poste, y dijo todas las palabras formales de la maldición. (cap. 57).
Tanto el rey como la reina pasaron el resto de sus vidas tratando de vengarse. Gunnhildr también le puso un hechizo a Egill, maldiciéndolo para que se sintiera inquieto y deprimido hasta que se volvieran a encontrar.
Poco después, Eiríkr y Gunnhildr fueron derrotados y derrocados por el rey Haakon el Bueno y se vieron obligados a huir al Reino de Northumbria , en la Inglaterra sajona . Eiríkr y Gunnhildr se convirtieron en rey y reina de Northumbria en rivalidad con el rey Athelstan de Inglaterra . Con el tiempo, Egill naufragó en Northumbria y llegó a saber quién gobernaba la tierra. Egill buscó la casa de su buen amigo Arinbjörn, donde se armaron y marcharon a la corte de Eiríkr. Arinbjörn le dice a Egill: "Ahora debes ir y ofrecer al rey tu cabeza y abrazar su pie. Le presentaré tu caso". Arinbjörn presenta el caso de Egill y Egill compone un breve drápa , recitándolo con el pie de Eiríkr en la mano, pero Eiríkr no quedó impresionado. Explicó que los muchos insultos de Egill no podían ser perdonados y que Egill debía perder la cabeza. Gunnhildr también pidió la ejecución inmediata de Egill, pero Arinbjörn convenció al rey de que esperara hasta la mañana.
Arinbjörn le dice a Egill que debería quedarse despierto toda la noche y componer un poderoso drápa , un poema en alabanza a su enemigo mortal . Por la mañana, Egill fue de nuevo ante el rey Eiríkr y recitó el drápa Höfuðlausn de veinte estrofas de largo , o "Head Ransom", que elogia las muchas victorias de Eirkr en batalla y aparece en su totalidad en el capítulo 63 de la saga de Egils . Eiríkr quedó tan impresionado por el poema que decidió concederle la vida a Egill, a pesar de que Egill había matado al propio hijo de Eiríkr.
La batalla de Ethandune
El poema de 1911 de GK Chesterton , La balada del caballo blanco, vuelve a contar la historia de la batalla de Ethandune , en la que un ejército del reino anglosajón de Wessex dirigido por el rey Alfredo el Grande derrotó al gran ejército pagano dirigido por el rey Guthrum de Oriente. -Anglia en una cita entre el 6 y el 12 de mayo de 878.
La batalla de Maldon
El poema en inglés antiguo La batalla de Maldon , que sobrevive solo en un fragmento inacabado, celebra la batalla del mismo nombre . El 11 de agosto de 991 , Byrhtnoth , Ealdorman del Reino de Essex , murió al frente de sus tropas luchando contra la tripulación invasora de un barco vikingo .
El drama en verso de JRR Tolkien de 1953 El regreso a casa de Beorhtnoth El hijo de Beorhthelm describe los eventos de la misma batalla.
Rey Brian Boru
La Bruxelles Texto original del cogad gáedel re gallaib , que se cree que fue escrito alrededor de 1635 por el franciscano fraile e historiador Mícheál Ó Cléirigh , contiene muchos poemas de guerra irlandesa que no se encuentran en otros lugares. Al igual que los otros dos manuscritos supervivientes, el manuscrito de Bruselas relata las guerras entre los clanes irlandeses y los invasores nórdicos y daneses , y celebra el último ascenso al poder de Brian Boru como Gran Rey de Irlanda .
La Cogad alega que cuando el rey Ivar de Limerick, Hiberno-Norse, intentó extender su poder a Thomond , el Jefe del Nombre Dál gCais , Mathgamain mac Cennétig , y su hermano menor, Brian Boru , "transportaron a su gente y bienes muebles a través del Shannon. , hacia el oeste, donde se dispersaron entre los bosques y arboledas del país ". [19]
Mathgamain, que había derrotado al rey Ivar y reclamado el Alto Reinado de Munster en la Roca de Cashel , fue capturado y asesinado en 976 por Donnubán mac Cathail y Máel Muad mac Brain , que luego reinó como rey de Munster durante los dos años siguientes.
Brian, el tanista de su clan, se sintió tan conmovido por la noticia del asesinato de su hermano que se dice que gritó públicamente y juró venganza.
Invasión normanda de Irlanda
La canción de Dermot y el conde es un anónimo anglo-normando verso crónica escrita en el siglo 13 a principios de Inglaterra. Relata la invasión de Irlanda en 1170por Diarmait Mac Murchada , el rey depuesto de Leinster , y Strongbow en 1170 (el "conde" en el título), las guerras que siguieron entre Strongbow y Haskulf Thorgilsson , el último rey hiberno-nórdico de Dublín. , y Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair , el último Gran Rey de Irlanda , y la posterior visita a Irlanda del Rey Enrique II de Inglaterra en 1172.
La crónica sobrevivió solo en un único manuscrito que fue redescubierto en el siglo XVII en el Palacio de Lambeth en Londres. [20] El manuscrito no tiene título, pero ha sido comúnmente apodado La canción de Dermot y el conde desde que Goddard Henry Orpen publicó una edición diplomática con este título en 1892.
Kievan Rus '
El cuento de la campaña de Igor ( Слово о пълкѹ Игоревѣ ), un poema épico en el antiguo eslavo oriental , describe una incursión fallida realizada en el año 1185 por un ejército dirigido por el príncipe Igor Svyatoslavich de Novgorod-Seversk (en el principado de Chernigov de la Rus de Kiev). en la Ucrania moderna) contra los polovtsianos ( cumanos ), nómadas turcos paganos que viven a lo largo de la orilla sur del río Don .
El Príncipe y sus guerreros presenciaron el eclipse solar del 1 de mayo de 1185 , [21] que fue interpretado por los guerreros de la Rus como un mensaje del Dios cristiano [22] y como un muy, muy mal presagio. [23] [24] Según The Lay , el príncipe Igor dio un largo discurso a sus guerreros y logró disipar sus temores. [25]
El poema continúa relatando cómo el ejército del Príncipe fue catastróficamente derrotado en la batalla por los cumanos en las orillas del río Don y cómo solo se salvaron quince guerreros de la Rus. Luego, los cumanos emprendieron una invasión masiva de represalia a la Rus de Kiev. Mientras tanto, el príncipe Igor y su hijo eran prisioneros personales de Khan Konchak . Aunque custodiado de cerca por sus captores, al príncipe Igor se le permitió una libertad considerable y se le permitió cazar con un halcón . Finalmente, el Príncipe escapó con la ayuda de uno de sus guardias de Cuman y regresó a la cristiandad , para alegría de toda la gente de Kievan Rus.
El poema termina ahí, pero el hijo del príncipe, Vladimir III Igorevich , que había contraído matrimonio arreglado con la hija del Khan, regresó unos años más tarde con la princesa Svoboda, su novia de Cuman. La hija del Khan fue bautizada y su matrimonio fue solemnizado en una ceremonia de rito bizantino conducida en antiguo eslavo eclesiástico .
Se mencionan muchas otras figuras históricas, incluidos skald Boyan ( El bardo ), los príncipes Vseslav de Polotsk , Yaroslav Osmomysl de Halych y Vsevolod, el gran nido de Suzdal . Mientras se basa en la tradición de la poesía de guerra perdida en el paganismo eslavo , el autor anónimo del poema apela a los príncipes cristianos en guerra de la Rus de Kiev y les suplica que se unan contra las constantes redadas, asesinatos, saqueos y esclavitud de sus súbditos por parte de los Tribus turcas paganas de la estepa .
Desde su redescubrimiento del siglo XVIII en un manuscrito del siglo XV de Yaroslavl y la publicación de 1800 de Aleksei Musin-Pushkin , The Lay , que a menudo se ha comparado con The Song of Roland and the Nibelungenlied , ha inspirado otros poemas, arte, música y la ópera. El príncipe Igor de Alexander Borodin . Es reclamada por rusos, bielorrusos y ucranianos como una epopeya nacional .
Dado que los personajes principales del poema procedían de la Ucrania moderna , The Lay ha tenido una enorme influencia en la literatura ucraniana . Por ejemplo, el poeta nacional de Ucrania , Taras Shevchenko , utilizó el "Lamento de Yaroslavna" del Laico de Igor como base para varios poemas propios. Los poetas ucranianos posteriores como Markian Shashkevych y Bogdan Lepky han seguido el ejemplo de Shevchenko. Lepky es particularmente conocido por su traducción de 1905 de The Lay al polaco .
The Lay también capturó la imaginación de la intelectualidad durante la Edad de Oro de la poesía rusa y ha tenido una gran influencia en la literatura y la cultura rusas . El poeta romántico Vasily Zhukovsky publicó una traducción de The Lay al ruso moderno en 1819. En el momento de su muerte en 1837 por las heridas recibidas en un duelo, el poeta nacional de Rusia , Alexander Pushkin , planeaba traducir la epopeya del antiguo eslavo oriental al ruso moderno. y dejó notas detalladas de sus planes para el proyecto. Las notas de Pushkin fueron utilizadas más tarde por Nikolay Zabolotsky , quien tradujo The Lay mientras estaba encarcelado en el Gulag de Karaganda , y por esta razón la traducción de Zablotsky sigue siendo la más popular.
En 1904, el poeta austríaco Rainer Maria Rilke tradujo The Lay al alemán. La traducción de Rilke se publicó póstumamente en 1930.
El Lay también ha sido traducido literalmente al inglés por Vladimir Nabokov , Dmitri Likhachev y Serge Zenkovsky, [26] y también a la métrica dactílica original en una colaboración entre los poetas canadienses Constantine Andrushyshen y Watson Kirkconnell . [27]
La conquista eduardiana de Gales
Después de la conquista de Gales por el rey Eduardo I de Inglaterra y la muerte del príncipe Llywelyn ap Gruffudd , a quien a menudo se le llama "Llewellyn el último", durante un levantamiento fallido en 1282, el poeta galés Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch escribió en una elegía :
¿No ves el camino del viento y la lluvia?
¿No ves los robles alborotados?
Frío mi corazón en un pecho temerosoPara
el rey, la puerta de roble de Aberffraw
La balada de 1857 del poeta húngaro János Arany A walesi bárdok ("Los bardos de Gales") relata la leyenda de tres bardos galeses que fueron convocados ante el rey Eduardo I para cantar sus alabanzas en el castillo de Montgomery en 1277. En cambio, los tres bardos no solo se niega a cantar alabanzas al rey, pero también decirle que el pueblo galés nunca olvidará ni perdonará las atrocidades que Edward ha cometido ni las muertes de los muchos galeses que perdieron la vida resistiendo la conquista.
Después de que el tercer bardo jura que no vive ningún bardo galés que jamás cante sus alabanzas, el rey furioso ordena a sus sirvientes que cacen a todos los bardos de Gales y los quemen a todos en la hoguera . La balada luego relata que 500 bardos galeses fueron arrestados y quemados hasta morir y que todos se negaron a salvar sus vidas alabando al rey inglés.
El poema termina con el rey Edward the Longshanks de regreso en Londres y siendo atormentado por pesadillas en las que los 500 bardos continúan cantando sobre sus crímenes contra su país y el odio eterno del pueblo galés por su nombre.
El poema, que Arany superó a la censura al afirmar que era una traducción de una balada medieval inglesa, es un ataque velado contra el emperador Franz Joseph por la derrota de la Revolución húngara de 1848 . [28] Se considera una obra inmortal de la literatura húngara .
La traducción al inglés más conocida fue realizada por el poeta canadiense Watson Kirkconnell , quien tradujo el poema de Arany en la misma métrica y el mismo idioma que Child Ballads , en 1933. [29] En septiembre de 2007, una copia al inglés de este poema, traducido por Peter Zollman, fue donado a la Biblioteca Nacional de Gales en Aberystwyth . [30] La traducción más reciente ha sido realizada por la poeta húngaro-estadounidense Erika Papp Faber.
La silla Bardic de 1982 en el National Eisteddfod of Wales fue otorgada a Gerallt Lloyd Owen por el awdl Cilmeri , que Hywel Teifi Edwards ha llamado el único awdl del siglo XX , que coincide con la obra maestra de 1902 de T. Gwynn Jones , Umadawiad Arthur ("The Passing of Arthur "). Owen's Cilmeri reinventa la muerte del príncipe Llywelyn ap Gruffudd de la Casa Real de Gwynedd en una batalla cerca de la aldea del mismo nombre en 1282, mientras lidera un alzamiento condenado contra la ocupación de Gales por el rey Eduardo I de Inglaterra . El poema de Owen describe al Príncipe como un héroe trágico y reviste su caída con una angustia sin igual desde que Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch escribió su famoso lamento por el Príncipe inmediatamente después de su muerte. Owen también, según Edwards, resume en la muerte del Príncipe la continua "batalla por la supervivencia nacional" del pueblo galés . [31]
Las guerras de independencia de Escocia
En 1375, el escocés Makar , o poeta de la corte, John Barbour completó el poema épico The Brus , que narra y celebra las hazañas de Robert the Bruce , quien dirigió al pueblo escocés en sus guerras de independencia contra los reyes Eduardo I y Eduardo II de Inglaterra y quien finalmente se convirtió en rey de Escocia .
Alrededor de 1488, su compañero escocés Makar Blind Harry escribió el poema épico The Wallace , sobre la vida y muerte del icónico nacionalista escocés Sir William Wallace .
Los acontecimientos de las guerras de independencia de Escocia también son un tema recurrente en el verso de Escocia 's poeta nacional , Robert Burns .
La batalla de Kulikovo
The 15th century poem Zadonschina, which draws upon the same tradition of Pre-Christian Slavic war poetry as The Tale of Igor, was composed to glorify the victory of Dmitri Donskoi, Great Prince of Moscow over Mamai and the Mongols of the Golden Horde at the Battle of Kulikovo along the Don River on 8 September 1380. The poem survives in six medieval manuscripts.
The author of Zadonshchina is believed to have been a certain Sofonii (Russian: Софоний) from Ryazan’. His name as the author of the text is mentioned in two surviving manuscript copies. Sofonii was probably one of the courtiers of Vladimir the Bold, a cousin of Great Prince Dmitri Donskoi, the hero of the poem.
El asedio de Szigetvár
The 1566 Battle of Szigetvár, in which a vastly outnumbered army of 2,300 Croatian and Hungarian soldiers in service to the Habsburg Monarchy and under the command of Nikola IV Zrinski, the Ban of Croatia, defended the Hungarian fortress of the same name against an enormous Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, has thrice been made the subject of epic poetry.
Historically, the Battle of Szigetvár concluded shortly after the death of the Sultan from natural causes inside his tent. In response, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, a Serbian Orthodox convert to Islam named Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, secretly executed all witnesses to the Sultan's death and concealed it to keep the Army's morale from breaking. Soon after, on 7 September 1566, Captain Zrinski's forces, having been greatly depleted, opened the fortress gates and rode out in a ferocious onslaught.
Approximately six hundred Hungarian and Croatian soldiers charged with sabers flying into the Turkish camp. During a counter-attack led by Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, Nikola Zrinski was struck down by two gunshots in the chest and an arrow to the face. He is said to have died smiling, possibly thinking of the one last surprise he had left behind for the Turks. As Turkish janissaries poured into the fortress, a slow-burning fuse set off a massive explosion in the gupowder magazine. The fortress of Szigetvár and more than 3,000 Turkish soldiers were blown to bits, in addition to the nearly 30,000 Turks who had already fallen during the Siege.
Even though the Grand Vizier claimed victory, the campaign, which had planned to besiege and capture Vienna, ended after the deaths of both Zrinski and the Sultan and the Army retreated to Belgrade, where Selim II, the son of Suleiman the Magnificent and Hurrem Sultan, was acclaimed as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Nikola Zrinski was acclaimed as a hero throughout Christendom. Cardinal Richelieu, the Minister of State to King Louis XIII of France, famously described the Siege of Szigetvár as "the battle that saved civilization".[32] Nikola Zrinski remains a national hero in both Croatia and Hungary and is often portrayed in artworks.
The first epic poem about the Siege was composed in Croatian by the poet Brne Karnarutić of Zadar, titled Vazetje Sigeta grada (English: The Taking of the City of Siget), and posthumously published at Venice in 1584. Karnarutić is known to have based his account very heavily on the memoirs of Zrinski's valet, Franjo Črnko.[33] Karnarutić is known to have drawn further inspiration from Marko Marulić's Judita.[34][35]
In 1651, Hungarian poet Miklós Zrínyi, the great grandson of Nikola Zrinski, published the epic poem Szigeti veszedelem ("The Siege of Sziget").
Choosing to model his work on Homer's Iliad and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, Zrínyi opens his poem with an invocation to the Muse (the Virgin Mary), and often features characters from Greek mythology; Cupid even appears and Captain Zrinski is several times compared to Hector in the text.
According to Encyclopædia Britannica Online, The Siege of Sziget is "the first epic poem in Hungarian literature" and "one of the major works of Hungarian literature".[36] Kenneth Clark's Civilisation describes Szigeti veszedelem as one of the major literary achievements of the 17th century. Even though John Milton's Paradise Lost is often credited with resurrecting Classical epic poetry, Milton's poem was published in 1667, sixteen years after Zrínyi's Szigeti Veszedelem.
Zrinyí's epic concludes with Nikola Zrinski personally killing the Sultan and then being gunned down by Turkish janissaries. However, most historians accept the Turkish sources which state that the Sultan died of natural causes in his tent before the final assault and that his death was kept secret to keep his army's morale from breaking.
Four translations are known to have been completed. The work was immediately translated into Croatian by Miklós's brother Petar Zrinski, who is mentioned in the fourteenth chapter of the epic, under the title of Opsida Sigecka. This version's original 1652 printing also proved to be its last for a long period of time. The only surviving copy was held by the Croatian central library in Zagreb, until a new edition was published by Matica hrvatska in 2016.[37] German and Italian translations were produced in the late 1800s and in 1908. A new German translation was published in Budapest in 1944; the translator, Árpád Guilleaume, was an officer in the Royal Hungarian Army during World War II, and his work was later banned after the war by the Communist People's Republic of Hungary. In 2011, an English translation by László Kőrössy was published by Catholic University of America in Washington, DC and is still currently in print.
Another Croatian nobleman warrior-poet Pavao Ritter Vitezović (1652–1713) wrote about the Battle. His poem Odiljenje sigetsko ("The Sziget Farewell"), first published in 1684, reminisces about the event without rancour or crying for revenge. The last of the four cantos is titled "Tombstones" and consists of epitaphs for the Croatian and Turkish warriors who died during the siege, paying equal respect to both.
La batalla de Lepanto
The Spanish novelist and poet Miguel de Cervantes served in combat during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and later retold his experiences in the sonnet form.
G.K. Chesterton retold the story of the same battle in his poem Lepanto, which was written in 1911 and published in 1915.
El levantamiento jacobita de 1715
In the song Là Sliabh an t-Siorraim, Sìleas na Ceapaich, the daughter of the 15th Chief of Clan MacDonald of Keppoch, sings of the joy upon the arrival of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, the indecisive Battle of Sheriffmuir and the state of uneasy anticipation between the battle and the end of the Jacobite rising of 1715. Sìleas is also known for her elegant lament for the Chief of Clan MacDonald of Glengarry, Alasdair a Gleanna Garadh, which hearkens back to the mythological poetry attributed to Amergin Glúingel.
Levantamiento jacobita de 1745
In the Scottish Gaelic, the greatest war poet of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 was Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, a tacksman from the Clanranald branch of Clan Donald.
Jacobite songs penned by Alasdair such as: Òran Nuadh – "A New Song", Òran nam Fineachan Gaidhealach – "The Song of the Highland Clans" and Òran do'n Phrionnsa – "A Song to the Prince," serve as testament to the Bard's passionate loyalty to the House of Stuart. According to literary historian John MacKenzie, these poems were sent to Aeneas MacDonald, the brother of the Clanranald tacksman of Kinlochmoidart, who was a banker in Paris. Aeneas read the poems aloud to Prince Charles Edward Stuart in English translation and the poems played a major role in convincing the Prince to come to Scotland and to initiate the Jacobite Rising of 1745.[38]
Alasdair served as the Prince's tutor in Gaelic and as a captain of the Clanranald men from the raising of the Standard at Glenfinnan until the final defeat at the Battle of Culloden.
Other poems about the Uprising were written in both Gaelic and English by John Roy Stewart, who served as colonel of the Edinburgh Regiment and a close and trusted confidant of Prince Charles Edward Stuart.
The Irish poem Mo Ghile Mear, which was composed by the County Cork Bard Seán "Clárach" Mac Domhnaill, is a lament for the defeat of the Uprising at the Battle of Culloden. The poem is a soliloquy by the Kingdom of Ireland, whom Seán Clárach personifies, according to the rules of the Aisling genre, as a woman from the Otherworld. The woman laments her state and describes herself as a grieving widow due to the defeat and exile of her lawful King.
Since being popularised by Sean O Riada, Mo Ghile Mear has become one of the most popular Irish songs ever written. It has been recorded by The Chieftains, Mary Black, Sting, and many other artists.
The Scottish Gaelic song Mo rùn geal òg ("My fair young love"), alternately known as Cumha do dh'Uilleam Siseal ("The Lament for William Chisholm") is a lament composed by Christina Fergusson for her husband, William Chisholm of Strathglass.
Fergusson was possibly born in Contin, Ross-shire.[39][40] She was married to William Chisholm, who was a blacksmith, armourer and standard bearer for the Chief of Clan Chisholm. Chisholm was killed in action on 16 April 1746, while bearing the standard of his Clan at the Battle of Culloden. In his memory, Ferguson wrote Mo Rùn Geal Òg (My Fair Young Love).[41][42][43][44] In the poem, Christina Fergusson rebukes Prince Charles Edward Stuart, saying that the loss of her husband in the fight for his cause has left her desolate.
The song has since been recorded by Flora MacNeil, Karen Matheson, and Julie Fowlis.
Poems about the Jacobite rising of 1745 have also been written in English by Sir Walter Scott, Carolina Nairne, Agnes Maxwell MacLeod, Allan Cunningham, and William Hamilton.
However, even as the British upper class and the literary world were romanticizing the Uprising and the culture of the Scottish clans, the suppression of Highland Scottish culture, which had begun after the rising's defeat, continued for nearly two centuries afterward.
For example, under to the 1872 Education Act, school attendance was compulsory and only English was taught or tolerated in the schools of both the Lowlands and the Highlands and Islands. As a result, any student who spoke Scots or Scottish Gaelic in the school or on its grounds could expect what Ronald Black calls the, "familiar Scottish experience of being thrashed for speaking [their] native language."[45]
Before serving in the Seaforth Highlanders in British India and during the Fall of France in 1940, Gaelic-language war poet Aonghas Caimbeul attended the 300-pupil Cross School on the Isle of Lewis after the 1872 Education Act. He later recalled, "A Lowlander, who had not a word of Gaelic, was the schoolmaster. I never had a Gaelic lesson in school, and the impression you got was that your language, people, and tradition had come from unruly, wild, and ignorant tribes and that if you wanted to make your way in the world you would be best to forget them completely. Short of the stories of the German Baron Münchhausen, I have never come across anything as dishonest, untruthful, and inaccurate as the history of Scotland as taught in those days."[46]
Even so, large numbers of the Scottish people, both Highlander and Lowlander, continued to enlist in the British armed forces and Scottish regiments becoming renowned worldwide as shock troops.
For this reason, literary critic Wilson MacLeod has written that, in post-Culloden Scottish Gaelic literature, anti-colonialist poets such as Duncan Livingstone "must be considered isolated voices. The great majority of Gaelic verse, from the eighteenth century onwards, was steadfastly Pro-British and Pro-Empire, with several poets, including Aonghas Moireasdan and Dòmhnall MacAoidh, enthusiastically asserting the conventual justificatory rationale for imperial expansion, that it was a civilising mission rather than a process of conquest and expropriation. Conversely, there is no evidence that Gaelic poets saw a connection between their own difficult history and the experience of colonised people in other parts of the world."[47]
revolución Americana
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1860 poem Paul Revere's Ride both retells and fictionalizes the efforts of Boston silversmith Paul Revere to warn Patriot militia of an imminent attack by the British Army on the night before the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 poem Concord Hymn pays tribute to the Patriot militia at the Battle of Concord and famously says that they fired, "The shot heard round the world."
David Humphreys wrote the first sonnet in American poetry in 1776, right before he left Yale College to fight as a colonel in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Colonel Humphreys' sonnet was titled Addressed to my Friends at Yale College, on my leaving them to join the Army.
Among the "earliest Scottish Gaelic poets in North America about whom we know anything", is Kintail-born Iain Mac Mhurchaidh ("John MacRae), who emigrated to the valley of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina around 1774, fought as a Loyalist during the American Revolution, and composed Gaelic war poetry there until his death around 1780.[48]
In 1783, the year that saw the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the Highland Clearances in Inverness-shire, Cionneach MacCionnich (1758–1837), a poet from Clan MacKenzie who was born at Castle Leather near Inverness,[49] composed the Gaelic poem The Lament of the North. In the poem, MacCionnich mocks the Scottish clan chiefs for becoming absentee landlords, evicting their clansmen en masse in favor of sheep, and of "spending their wealth uselessly", in London. He accuses King George III of England both of tyranny and of steering the ship of state into shipwreck. MacCionnich also argues that truth is on the side of George Washington and the Continental Army and that the Scottish Gaels would do well to emigrate to the United States before the King and the landlords take every farthing they have left.[50]
Ali Pashiad
During the early 19th century, Albanian Muslim bard Haxhi Shehreti composed the epic poem Alipashiad. The work is inspired by and named after Ali Pasha, the governor of the Pashalik of Ioannina in Ottoman Greece, describing, in heroic style, his life, and his military campaigns. The poem is written in Demotic Greek, which Shehreti considered a far more prestigious language than Turkish or Albanian. Historically, the Alipashiad is unique in Greek poetry due to its having been written from an Islamic point of view.[51]
The Alipashiad, which consists of 15,000 lines, was written in the early 19th century, when Ali Pasha was at his height as the semi-independent ruler of much of Ottoman Greece.
Apart from describing Ali's adventures the poem describes Ioannina, which was a center of Greek culture and renaissance that time,[52][51] as well as the activities of the local mercenaries (Armatoles) and revolutionaries (Klephts) that Ali had to deal with.[51]
According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, however, after his 1820 outlawry and 1822 death while leading an uprising against Sultan Mahmud II of the Ottoman Empire, Ali Pasha became, in Western literature, the personification of an "oriental despot".[53]
La guerra de independencia griega
The Greek War of Independence raged from 1821 to 1830 and which resulted in the independence of the Greek people after more than four hundred years of rule by the Ottoman Empire. The uprising and its many predecessors also produced many great composers of war poetry.
In English poetry, Lord Byron, who had fled England ahead of legal proceedings being filed by his many creditors and immediately following the very public breakup of his marriage to Lady Byron, is by far the most famous of these poets. Byron travelled to Greece during the fighting and joined the Greek rebels. Byron also glorified the Greek cause in many of his poems, which continued to be widely read. In 1824, Byron died at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First and Second Siege of Missolonghi. To this day, the Greek people revere him as a national hero.
Even though he was strangled by order of the Sultan in 1798 while planning a Greek uprising with the assistance of Napoleon Bonaparte, the nationalist verse of Rigas Feraios (1757–1798) helped inspire the Greek War of Independence and he remains a major figure in Greek poetry. In his poems, Feraios urged the Greek people to leave the cities for the mountains and to fight in the mountains to gain their independence.
Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), another poet of the Greek War of Independence, wrote the Hymn to Liberty, which is now the Greek national anthem, in 1823, just two years after the Greeks rose against the Ottoman Empire.It is also the national anthem of Cyprus, which adopted it in 1966. Solomon's is considered to be the national poet of Greece.
To this day, many songs are sung worldwide on 25 March by members of the Greek diaspora to celebrate Greek independence and showcase their respect for the many Greek lives that were lost during the more four hundred years of Ottoman rule.
Revoluciones alemanas de 1848-1849
Georg Herwegh who wrote during the German revolutions of 1848–49 is an example of a 19th-century German war poet.[54][55]
Revolución húngara de 1848
The Hungarian Revolution of 1848 was, in large part, inspired by the poetry of Sándor Petőfi, who is still considered Hungary's national poet.
The uprising began on 15 March 1848, when Petőfi read his poem Nemzeti Dal ("National Song") aloud on the steps of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. The poem triggered a massive demonstration in the streets of the city, which forced the Emperor's representatives to accept the end of censorship and the release of all political prisoners.
The Revolution eventually resulted in a civil war between a Hungarian Republican Government led by Lajos Kossuth and Hungarian Monarchists, many of whom were ethnic minorities, who remained loyal to the House of Hapsburg. In response, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who had been raised on stories of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, ordered the Imperial Russian Army to enter Hungary and to ally themselves with the monarchists.
Despite efforts by General Józef Bem to keep him out of danger, Petőfi insisted on going into combat against the Monarchists and their Russian allies. Petőfi is believed to have either been killed in action during the Battle of Segesvár on 31 July 1849, or to have subsequently died in a Tsarist penal colony near Barguzin, in Siberia. At the time of his presumed death, Petőfi was only 26 years old.
Despite the defeat of the uprising, Petőfi's poetry and nostalgia for the 1848 Revolution have become a major part of Hungary's national identity.
According to Reg Gadney, the anti-communist Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began on 23 October 1956, when 20,000 student protesters gathered around the statue of Sándor Petőfi on the Pest side of the Danube River. During the gathering, Nemzeti Dal was recited to the demonstrators by Imre Sinkovics, a young actor from the Budapest National Theater. The demonstrators then read out a list of sixteen demands to the Communist Government of Hungary, laid wreaths at the foot of the statue, and crossed the Danube to Buda, where the demonstration continued before the statue of General Józef Bem.[56]
Like Petőfi's first reading of the poem on 15 March 1848, the demonstration grew into a city-wide affair, and then into a temporarily successful nationwide uprising against the existing regime, which was only quelled by the intervention of the Russian Army.
Guerra de Crimea
Probably the most famous 19th-century war poem is Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade", which he supposedly wrote in only a few minutes after reading an account of the battle in The Times. As poet laureate, he often wrote verses about public events. It immediately became hugely popular, even reaching the troops in the Crimea, where it was distributed in pamphlet form.[57]
Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Last of the Light Brigade", written some forty years after the appearance of "The Charge of the Light Brigade", in 1891, focuses on the terrible hardships faced in old age by veterans of the Crimean War, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the Light Brigade, in an attempt to shame the British public into offering financial assistance.[58] Various lines from the poem are randomly quoted by Mr. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.
Guerra civil americana
As the American Civil War was beginning, American poet Walt Whitman published his poem "Beat! Beat! Drums!" as a patriotic rally call for the North.[59] Whitman volunteered for a time as a nurse in the army hospitals,[60] and his collection Drum-Taps (1865) deals with his experiences during the War.
Novelist Herman Melville also wrote many poems about the war which support the Union side.
On 18 July 1863, Die Minnesota-Staats-Zeitung, a newspaper published by and for German-speaking Forty-Eighters living in Minnesota, printed An die Helden des Ersten Minnesota Regiments ("To the Heroes of the First Minnesota Regiment"), a work of German poetry in tribute to the Union soldiers of the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment and their iconic charge from Cemetery Ridge during the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. The poet was G. A. Erdman of Hastings, Minnesota.[61]
Also during the American Civil War, Edward Thomas, a Welsh-language poet from Centerville, Ohio and whose Bardic name was Awenydd, enlisted in Company E of the 2nd Minnesota Cavalry Regiment. During his service in that Regiment, Thomas wrote many Welsh poems, including Pryddest ar Wir Fawredd, which later won the Bardic Crown at an Eisteddfod held in Minersville, Pennsylvania. After the end of the war, Thomas became a Presbyterian minister.[62]
On the Confederate side, the most well known Civil War poet is Father Abram Ryan, a Roman Catholic priest and former military chaplain to the Confederate Army. Father Ryan, who eulogized the defeated South in poems like The Conquered Banner and The Sword of Lee, is sometimes referred to as "The Poet-Priest of the Confederacy," and as "The Poet Laureate of the South."
Guerra de los bóers
Rudyard Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War,[63] including the well known "Lichtenberg", which is about a combatant's death in a foreign land.[64] Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and others wrote also poems relating to the Boer War. Hardy's poems include "Drummer Hodge", and "The Man He Killed". '"Swinburne regularly donated work to the papers to rouse the spirit, from 'Transvaal', with the infamous closing line, 'Strike, England, and strike home', to 'The Turning of the Tide'."[65]
"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
"I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like – just as I –
Was out of work – had sold his traps –
No other reason why.
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."
Thomas Hardy's Boer War poem "The Man He Killed" (1909).[66]
During the last phase of the war in the former Orange Free State, the Afrikaner people of Winburg taunted the Scottish regiments in the local British Army garrison with a parody of the Jacobite ballad Bonnie Dundee, which was generally sung in English. The parody celebrated the guerrilla warfare of Boer Commando leader Christiaan De Wet.
- De Wet he is mounted, he rides up the street
- The English skedaddle an A1 retreat!
- And the commander swore: They've got through the net
- That's been spread with such care for Christiaan De Wet.
- There are hills beyond Winburg and Boers on each hill
- Sufficient to thwart ten generals' skill
- There are stout-hearted burghers 10,000 men set
- On following the Mausers of Christian De Wet.
- Then away to the hills, to the veld, to the rocks
- Ere we own a usurper we'll crouch with the fox
- And tremble false Jingoes amidst all your glee
- Ye have not seen the last of my Mausers and me! [67]
Primera Guerra Mundial
In a 2020 article for the St Austin Review about American WWI poet John Allan Wyeth, Dana Gioia writes, "The First World War changed European literature forever. The horror of modern mechanized warfare and the slaughter of nineteen million young men and innocent civilians traumatized the European imagination. For poets, the unprecedented scale of violence annihilated the classic traditions of war literature – individual heroism, military glory, and virtuous leadership. Writers struggled for a new idiom commensurate with their apocalyptic personal experience. European Modernism emerged from the trenches of the Western Front.
"British poetry especially was transformed by the trauma of trench warfare and indiscriminate massacre. The 'War Poets' constitute an imperative presence in modern British literature with significant writers such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, Ivor Gurney, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg. Their work, which combined stark realism and bitter irony with a sense of tragic futility, altered the history of English literature.
"Similar cohorts of war poets occupy important positions in other European literature's. French literature has Charles Peguy, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars (who lost his right arm at the Second Battle of Champagne). Italian poetry has Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Gabriele D'Annunzio. German poetry has Georg Trakl, August Stramm, and Gottfried Benn.
"These scarred survivors reshaped the sensibility of modern verse. The Great War also changed literature in another brutal way; it killed countless young writers."[68]
Serbia
Serbian World War I poets include: Milutin Bojić, Vladislav Petković Dis, Miloš Crnjanski, Dušan Vasiljev, Ljubomir Micić, Proka Jovkić, Rastko Petrović, Stanislav Vinaver, Branislav Milosavljević, Milosav Jelić, Vladimir Stanimirović. and others.[69]
Austria-Hungary
There were also war poets from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Géza Gyóni, a Hungarian poet with twin beliefs in socialism and anti-militarism, had unhappily served in the Austro-Hungarian Army prior to the outbreak of war in 1914. In response, Gyóni had written the great pacifist poem, Cézar, én nem megyek ("Caesar, I Will Not Go").[70]
But after the police investigation into the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand revealed the involvement of Serbian Army military intelligence chief Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, Gyóni, like many other Austro-Hungarians, accepted the Imperial Government's allegations of, "a plot against us," and the necessity of fighting, "a defensive war." Some Hungarian intellectuals felt that World War I provided an excellent opportunity to pay back the House of Romanov for Tsar Nicholas I's pivotal role in the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.[71]
Gyóni re-enlisted and seemed initially to enjoy the soldier's life, regularly writing poetry that was sent back home from the front for publication.
According to Peter Sherwood, "Gyóni's first, still elated, poems from the Polish Front recall the 16th century Hungarian poet Bálint Balassi's soldiers' songs of the marches, written during the campaign against the Turks."[72]
During the Siege of Przemyśl, Gyóni wrote poems to encourage the city's defenders and these verses were published there, under the title, Lengyel mezőkön, tábortúz melett (By Campfire on the Fields of Poland). A copy reached Budapest by aeroplane, which was an unusual feat in those days.[73]
In Hungary, the politician Jenő Rákosi, used the popularity of Gyóni's collection to set up Gyóni as a brave soldier poet and as the paragon of the Hungarian poetic ideal, as opposed to Endre Ady, who was a pacifist.[73] Meanwhile, Gyóni's poetry took an increasingly depressive turn.
According to Erika Papp Faber, "His leaning toward Socialism and his anti-militarist attitude were, for a brief time, suspended, as he was caught up in the general patriotic fervor at the outbreak of World War I. But once he experienced the horrors of war first hand, he soon lost his romantic notions, and returned to the more radical positions of his youth, as it evident in his further volumes."[74]
One of his poems from this period, Csak egy éjszakára (For Just One Night), in which he calls for Hungary's war profiteers, industrialists, and armchair patriots to come and spend just one night in the trenches, became a prominent anti-war poem and its popularity has lasted well beyond the end of the First World War.
Gyóni was ultimately captured by the Imperial Russian Army after the surrender of Przemyśl in 1915. Gyóni wrote a poem in captivity which represented his attitude to life entitled Magyar bárd sorsa (A Hungarian bard's fate).
- Nekem magyar bárd sorsát mérték:
- Úgy hordom végig a világon
- Véres keresztes magyarságom,
- Mint zarándok a Krisztus képét.[75]
A Hungarian bard's is my fate
To carry across the world
My bloodied, crusading Magyarhood
Like a pilgrim with a picture of Christ.[72]
After being held for two years in atrocious conditions as a Prisoner of War, Gyóni died in a POW camp at Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, on 25 June 1917. His last book of poems was published posthumously in 1919.
Géza Gyóni's anti-war poem Csak egy éjszakára ("For just one night"), remains very popular and is still taught in Hungarian schools. It has been translated into English by Canadian poet Watson Kirkconnell and by Hungarian American poet Erika Papp Faber.
Although Kirkconnell's translation renders Gyóni's poem into the same idiom as British war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg,[76] Erika Papp Faber's version is far more faithful to the original poem in Hungarian.[77]
Georg Trakl, an Expressionist poet from Salzburg, enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army as a medical officer in 1914. He personally witnessed the Battle of Gródek, fought in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, in which the Austro-Hungarian Army suffered a bloody defeat at the hands of the Imperial Russian Army. After the battle, Trakl was left in command of a field hospital filled with wounded soldiers and mentally collapsed from the ensuing strain.
One evening following the battle Trakl ran outside and attempted to shoot himself to escape from the screams of the wounded and the dying. He was prevented from doing so and was sent to a mental hospital. On the night of 3–4 November 1914, Georg Trakl died in a military hospital in Cracow from an overdose of cocaine. Trakl's batman, however, who was the last person to whom the poet spoke, believed that the overdose was an accident, rather than suicide.[78] Georg Trakl is best known for the poem Grodek.
Franz Janowitz
, a Jewish poet who wrote in German from Podiebrad an der Elbe in the Kingdom of Bohemia,[79] had enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army as a one-year volunteer in 1913.Upon the outbreak of war, Janowitz was stationed at Bozen in South Tirol and was immediately mobilized and sent to the Eastern Front. Following combat against the Imperial Russian Army in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Janowitz's Battalion was stationed behind the lines at Enns in Lower Austria, where most of his war poetry was written.
Janowitz was wounded in the chest by machine-gun fire from the Royal Italian Army during an assault on Monte Rombon, located near Bovec in the Julian Alps of modern Slovenia. The assault was part of the joint Austro-German counteroffensive known as the Battle of Caporetto.
On 4 November 1917, Janowitz died of his wounds at the nearby Field-Hospital #1301 at Mittel-Breth and was buried in the military cemetery at the same village. He has most likely been moved to the Austro-Hungarian military cemetery at Bovec in modern Slovenia.
Two years after his death, a volume of Janowitz's war poems, Aus der Erde und anderen Dichtungen ("Out of the Earth and Other Poems") was published in Munich. The first complete collection of his poems, however, came out only in 1992.
According to Jeremy Adler, "Franz Janowitz conflicts with the received idea of the best German war poets. Neither realistic, nor ironic, nor properly expressionistic, while he excoriated the battlefield that the whole world had become, he still preserved a Faith in nobility, innocence, and song. Forced into maturity by the war, his poetic voice never lost a certain childlike note – indeed, in some of his best poems, naivety and wisdom coexist to an almost paradoxical degree. Such poetry was fired by a vision of a transcendental realm that lay beyond conflict, but never sought to exclude death. His 25 years, the last four of which were spent in the Army, scarcely left him time to develop a wholly independent voice, but his work displays an increasing mastery of form and deepening of vision. His small oeuvre consists of Novellen, essays, aphorisms, and a handful of the best German poems connected with the Great War."[80]
Germany
Despite the last-ditch efforts of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II to avert the outbreak of the Great War through the Willy-Nicky Telegrams, the German people greeted the international crisis of August 1914 with patriotic euphoria. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Berlin, singing patriotic songs and loudly cheering the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador, the Kaiser, and their elected representatives. So great was the popular enthusiasm, that both the Kaiser and politicians from every political party concluded that if they did not go to war, they would never survive politically. A few anti-war rallies were organized by elements of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but even that Party's far-left ultimately bowed to the popular will and agreed to support the war effort.[81]
Even though historians of World War I poetry have traditional focused on English poets, there were also many talented German war poets, such as Rudolf G. Binding and Heinrich Mann.
August Stramm, who is considered the first of the expressionists, has been called by Jeremy Adler one of, "the most innovative poets of the First World War." Stramm, Adler writes, treated, "language like a physical material" and, "honed down syntax to its bare essentials." Citing Stramm's fondness for "fashioning new words out of old," Adler has also written that, "what James Joyce did on a grand scale for English, Stramm achieved more modestly for German."[82]
Stramm's radically experimental verse and his major influence on all subsequent German poetry has also caused him to be compared to Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, and T.S. Eliot.
A reserve officer in the Imperial German Army, Stramm was called up to active service immediately upon the outbreak of World War I. Serving as a company commander on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, Stramm repeatedly distinguished himself by acts of courage under enemy fire. Stramm's performance was particularly praised while he was serving under the command of General August von Mackensen during the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive, which successfully drove the Imperial Russian Army out of Austrian Galicia and Congress Poland and into the Great Retreat of 1915. For his actions during the Offensive, Captain Stramm was highly decorated by both the Imperial German and Austro-Hungarian Armies.
At the beginning of August 1915, Stramm was sent home to Berlin on what would be his final furlough. His daughter Inge, who adored her father, later recalled how Stramm made her ten-year-old brother promise, "never to let himself down," by being, "a Schweinhund before himself."[83]
His family would later learn that throughout his furlough, Stramm had carried a letter in his pocket which he needed only to countersign to be released from all future military service at his publisher's request. By this time, Stramm had come to detest the war and believed that his death in combat was imminent. His mind was also filled with projects that he longed to write down. In the end, however, Stramm was, according to Patrick Bridgwater, "unable to accept the alibi of a higher duty to literature," and left the letter unsigned.[83]
On 1 September 1915, mere weeks after returning to his unit, Captain August Stramm was shot in the head during brutal hand-to-hand combat against soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army who had retreated into the Rokitno Marshes.
According to Jeremy Adler, Stramm was about to be awarded the Iron Cross (First Class) at the time of his death.[84]
According to Patrick Bridgwater, "What is quite extraordinary is that he appears to have found in the hell-on-earth of total warfare around Brest-Litovsk in 1915 the sense of harmony he had sought for so long."[83]
A few weeks before his death, Stramm had written to Herwarth Walden, "Singularly, life and death are one... Both are one... Battle and the night and death and the nightingale are all one. One! And fighting and sleeping and dreaming and acting are all one! There is no separation! All goes together and swims and shimmers like sun and whirlpool. Only time goes forward, time this. So do fighting, hungering, singing, dying. All! Soldier and officer! Day and night! Sorrowing and bleeding! And a hand shines over me! I swim through everything. Am everything! I!".[85]
On 2 September 1915, Captain August Stramm was buried with full military honors in the German military cemetery at Gorodec, in the Kobryn District of modern Belarus.
When the war broke out in 1914, Gerrit Engelke, a working-class poet from Hanover, was in neutral Denmark. He at first hesitated to return, but was ultimately forced to do so by financial pressures. He served in combat for four years, experiencing the battles of Langemarck, St. Mihiel, the Somme, Dünaberg, and Verdun. In 1916, he was awarded the Iron Cross for swimming across the flooded Yser River. Engelke was wounded in 1917 and, during his recovery, he became engaged to a war widow, but was forced to return to combat in May 1918. His friends attempted to have him transferred away from the firing line, much to Engelke's outrage, as he felt a deep loyalty to his brothers in arms. He was fatally injured during a successful British assault on 11 October 1918, and died the following day at a British field hospital. He had previously written, "The greatest task which faces us after the war will be to forgive our enemy, who has, after all, been our neighbour on Earth since Creation."[86]
Gerrit Engelke is best known for his anti-war poem An die Soldaten Des Grossen Krieges ("To the Soldiers of the Great War"), a poem in rhymed dactylic hexameter modeled after the Neo-Classical odes of Friedrich Hölderlin. In the ode, Engelke urges the soldiers of all the combatant nations to join hands together in universal brotherhood. An English translation exists by Patrick Bridgwater.
Walter Flex, who is best known as the author of the war poem Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht and the novella Der Wanderer zwischen Beiden Welten, was a native of Eisenach, in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and had attended the University of Erlangen. At the outbreak of the war, Flex was working as a private tutor to a family from the German nobility. Despite weak ligaments in his right hand, Flex immediately volunteered for the Imperial German Army.
According to Tim Cross, "His poetic outpourings on the war were prolific. Two collections, Sonne und Schild and Im Felde Zwischen Tag und Nacht were produced in the first months of the war. His body, soul, and literary talent were placed wholly at the disposal of the war-effort. The Christmas Fable for the 50th Regiment earned him the Order of the Red Eagle with Crown."[87]
After service on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, Flex was fatally wounded in Estonia during Operation Albion. He died of his wounds at Oti Manor, on Saaremaa island on 16 October 1917.
Walter Flex was buried in the cemetery of Peude Church in the village of the same name.
Flex's epitaph was a quote from his 1915 war poem, Preußischer Fahneneid ("The Prussian Military Oath"):
- "Wer je auf Preußens Fahne schwört,
- Hat nichts mehr, was ihm selbst gehört."
(Translation:
- "He whom on Prussia's banner swears
- Has nothing more his own to bear.") [88]
In 1940, his body was moved to a new military cemetery in Königsberg, East Prussia. Walter Flex's grave, along with the rest the city, were completely destroyed during the three-month siege that preceded the city's surrender to the Soviet Army on 9 April 1945.[89]
Owing to Flex's idealism about the Great War, the posthumous popularity of his writing, and the iconic status that was attached to his wartime death, he is now considered Germany's answer to Allied war poets Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger.
Yvan Goll, a Jewish poet from Sankt Didel, in the disputed territory of Alsace-Lorraine, wrote bilingually in both German and French. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Goll fled to Zürich, in neutral Switzerland, to evade conscription into the Imperial German Army. While there, he wrote many anti-war poems, in which he sought to promote better understanding between Germany and France. His most famous war poem is Requiem. Für die Gefallenen von Europa (Requiem for the Dead of Europe).
Stefan George, a German poet who had done his literary apprenticeship with the French Symbolist poets in Paris, still had many friends in France and viewed the Great War as disastrous. In his 1916 anti-war poem Der Krieg ("The War"), George attacked the horrors that soldiers of all nations were facing in the trenches. In the poem, George famously declared, "The ancient god of battles is no more."
Reinhard Sorge, the Kleist Prize winning author of the Expressionist play Der Bettler, saw the coming of the war as an idealistic recent convert to the Roman Catholic Church. Sorge wrote many poems, many of which are in the experimental forms pioneered by August Stramm and Herwarth Walden, about both his Catholic Faith and what he was witnessing as a soldier with the Imperial German Army in France. Shortly before being mortally wounded by grenade fragments during the Battle of the Somme, Sorge wrote to his wife expressing a belief that what he called, "the Anglo-French Offensive" was going to succeed in overrunning German defenses. Sorge died in a field hospital at Ablaincourt on 20 July 1916. Sorge's wife only learned of his death when a letter, in which she informed her husband that he had gotten her pregnant during his last furlough, was returned to her as undeliverable.
In 1920, German poet Anton Schnack, whom Patrick Bridgwater has dubbed, "one of the two unambiguously great," German poets of World War I and, "the only German language poet whose work can be compared with that of Wilfred Owen," published the sonnet sequence, Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier ("Beast Strove Mightily with Beast").[90]
Also according to Bridgwater, "The poems in Tier gewaltig mit Tier follow an apparently chronological course which suggests that Schnack served first in France and then in Italy. They trace the course of the war, as he experienced it, from departing for the front, through countless experiences to which few other German poets with the exception of Stramm have done justice in more than isolated poems, to retreat and the verge of defeat."[91]
The 60 sonnets that comprise Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier, "are dominated by themes of night and death."[92] Although his ABBACDDCEFGEFG rhyme scheme is typical of the sonnet form, Schnack also, "writes in the long line in free rhythms developed in Germany by Ernst Stadler,"[92] whom in turn had been inspired by the experimental free verse which had been introduced into American poetry by Walt Whitman.
Patrick Bridgwater, writing in 1985, called Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier, "without question the best single collection produced by a German war poet in 1914–18." Bridgwater adds, however, that Anton Schnack, "is to this day virtually unknown even in Germany."[90]
France
Amongst French World War I poets are the following: Guillaume Apollinaire, Adrien Bertrand, Yvan Goll, and Charles Péguy.
Upon the outbreak of war in 1914, Blaise Cendrars, a Francophone Swiss poet of partially Scottish descent from La Chaux-de-Fonds, Canton of Neuchâtel, was living in Paris and playing a major role in modernist poetry. When it began, Cedrars and Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo appealed to other foreign artists, writers, and intellectuals to join the French Army. He joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915, he was in the trenches at Frise (La Grenouillère and Bois de la Vache). During the Second Battle of Champagne in September 1915, Cendrars lost his right arm and was discharged from the French Army.
Cendrars later described his war experiences in the books La Main coupée ("The Severed Hand") and J'ai tué ("I Have Killed"), and it is the subject of his poem "Orion" in Travel Notes:
- "It is my star
- It is in the shape of a hand
- It is my hand gone up to the sky..."
The French Symbolist poet Louis Pergaud considered himself a Pacifist and, at the outbreak of war in 1914, he tried in vain to register as a conscientious objector. Instead, he was conscripted into the French Army and sent to the trenches of the Western Front.
On 7 April 1915, Pergaud's regiment attacked the Imperial German Army's trenches near Fresnes-en-Woëvre, during which he was wounded. Pergaud fell into barbed wire, where he became trapped. Several hours later, German soldiers rescued him and other wounded French soldiers and took them to a temporary field hospital behind German lines. On the morning of 8 April 1915, Pergaud and many other POWs were killed by friendly fire, when a French artillery barrage destroyed the hospital.
Jean de La Ville de Mirmont, a Huguenot poet from Bourdeaux, was overjoyed by the outbreak of the war.
According to Ian Higgins, "Although unfit for active service, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont volunteered immediately when the war broke out, but it was only after being repeatedly turned down that he finally managed to enlist."[93]
In 1914, he was called to the front with the rank of sergeant of the 57th Infantry Regiment.
According to Ian Higgins, "It has been suggested that here at last was the great adventure he had been longing for. Certainly, the prelude to the war 'interested' him, and he was keen to witness and, if possible, take part in a war which was probably going to 'set the whole of Europe on fire.' His Lettres de guerre develop movingly from initial enthusiasm for the defense of Civilization and a conviction that the enemy was the entire German people, through a growing irritation with chauvinistic brainwashing and the flagrancy of what would now be called the 'disinformation' peddled through the French press (so much more heavily censored than the British, he said), to an eventual admiration, at the front, for the heroism and humanity often shown by the enemy."[93]
La Ville de Mirmont was mentioned in French Army dispatches on 4 November 1914.[93]
On 28 November, however, he was buried alive by a landmine explosion at Verneuil, near Chemin des Dames. Sergeant de La Ville de Mirmont was still alive when his comrades dug him out, but the explosion had broken his spinal column and he died soon afterwards. One account alleges that he died after saying, Maman. Other accounts, allege, however, that there were no last words.[93]
The Breton poet and activist Yann-Ber Kalloc'h, a former Catholic seminarian from the island of Groix near Lorient, was best known by his Bardic name of Bleimor.
Even though he often used to say, "I am not in the least bit French",[94] Kalloc'h enlisted in the French Army upon the outbreak of war in 1914.
According to Ian Higgins, "When the war came, [Kalloc'h], like so many others, saw it as a defense of civilization and Christianity, and immediately volunteered for the front. 'Only Ireland and Brittany', he writes in one poem, 'still help Christ carry the cross: in the fight to reinvigorate Christianity, the Celtic peoples are in the van'. In addition, now readily fighting for France, he saw the war as the great chance to affirm the national identity of Brittany and resurrect its language and culture."[94]
Yann-Ber Kalloc'h, who wielded a sailor's axe formerly used in the French Navy for boarding enemy ships and was reportedly a terrible foe in hand-to-hand combat. His motto was "For God and Brittany". He was killed in action on 10 April 1917, when a German shell landed near his dugout near Urvillers/Cerizy (Aisne).[95]
His last poetry collection, Ar en Deulin, was published posthumously.
Russia
Russia also produced a number of significant war poets including Alexander Blok, Ilya Ehrenburg (who published war poems in his book "On the Eve"), and Nikolay Semenovich Tikhonov (who published the book Orda (The Horde) in 1922).[96]
The Acmeist poet Nikolay Gumilyov served in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I. He saw combat in East Prussia, the Macedonian front, and with the Russian Expeditionary Force in France. He was also decorated twice with the Cross of St. George. Gumilyov's war poems were assembled in the collection The Quiver (1916).
Gumilyov's wife, the poetess Anna Akhmatova, began writing poems during World War I that expressed the collective suffering of the Russian people as men were called up and the women in their lives bade them goodbye. For Akhmatova, writing such poems turned into her life's work and she continued writing similar poems about the suffering of the Russian people during the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the Red Terror, and Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.
British Empire and Commonwealth
Australia
Leon Gellert, an Australian poet of Hungarian descent, was born in Walkerville, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. He enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force's 10th Battalion within weeks of the outbreak of war and sailed for Cairo on 22 October 1914. He landed at ANZAC Cove, during the Gallipoli Campaign on 25 April 1915,[97] was wounded and repatriated as medically unfit in June 1916. He attempted to re-enlist but was soon found out.
During periods of inactivity he had been indulging his appetite for writing poetry. Songs of a Campaign (1917) was his first published book of verse, and was favourably reviewed by The Bulletin. Angus & Robertson soon published a new edition, illustrated by Norman Lindsay. His second, The Isle of San (1919), also illustrated by Lindsay, was not so well received.
John O'Donnell was born in Tuam, County Galway, in 1890, and served in the Australian Imperial Force during World War I. He arrived at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 and later fought at the Battle of the Somme. In 1918 he was invalided back to Australia, during which time he wrote the last six poems of his only poetry collection, dealing with the war from the perspective of an Australian poet.
Canada
John McCrae, a Scottish-Canadian poet and surgeon from Guelph, Ontario, had already served in the Canadian Light Artillery during the Second Anglo-Boer War. Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, McCrae joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and was appointed as medical officer and major of the 1st Brigade CFA (Canadian Field Artillery).[98] He treated the wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, from a hastily dug, 8-by-8-foot (2.4 m × 2.4 m) bunker dug in the back of the dyke along the Yser Canal about 2 miles north of Ypres.[99] McCrae's friend and former militia pal, Lt. Alexis Helmer,[100] was killed in the battle, and his burial inspired the poem, In Flanders Fields, which was written on 3 May 1915, and first published in the magazine Punch.
From 1 June 1915, McCrae was ordered away from the artillery to set up No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at Dannes-Camiers near Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern France. C.L.C. Allinson reported that McCrae "most unmilitarily told [me] what he thought of being transferred to the medicals and being pulled away from his beloved guns. His last words to me were: 'Allinson, all the goddamn doctors in the world will not win this bloody war: what we need is more and more fighting men.'"[101]
In Flanders Fields appeared anonymously in Punch on 8 December 1915, but in the index, to that year McCrae was named as the author. The verses swiftly became one of the most popular poems of the war, used in countless fund-raising campaigns and frequently translated (a Latin version begins In agro belgico...). "In Flanders Fields" was also extensively printed in the United States, whose government was contemplating joining the war, alongside a 'reply' by R. W. Lillard, ("...Fear not that you have died for naught, / The torch ye threw to us we caught...").
On 28 January 1918, while still commanding No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill) at Boulogne, Lt.-Col. McCrae died of pneumonia with "extensive pneumococcus meningitis"[102] at the British General Hospital in Wimereux, France. He was buried the following day in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission section of Wimereux Cemetery,[103] just a couple of kilometres up the coast from Boulogne, with full military honours.[104] His flag-draped coffin was borne on a gun carriage and the mourners – who included Sir Arthur Currie and many of McCrae's friends and staff – were preceded by McCrae's charger, "Bonfire", with McCrae's boots reversed in the stirrups. Bonfire was with McCrae from Valcartier, Quebec until his death and was much loved.[99][104] McCrae's gravestone is placed flat, as are all the others in the section, because of the unstable sandy soil.[105]
Robert W. Service, an English-Canadian poet from Preston, Lancashire and who had already been dubbed, "The Canadian Kipling", was living in Paris when World War I broke out. He attempted to enlist, but was turned down for being overage at 41 and "due to varicose veins." Service was a war correspondent for the Toronto Star (from 11 December 1915, through 29 January 1916), but "was arrested and nearly executed in an outbreak of spy hysteria in Dunkirk." He then "worked as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver with the Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross, until his health broke." Robert W. Service received three medals for his war service: 1914–15 Star, British War Medal and the Victory Medal.[106]
While recuperating in Paris, Service wrote a volume of war poems, Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man, which was published in Toronto in 1916). The book was dedicated to the memory of Service's "brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, Killed in Action, France, August 1916."[107]
In 1926, Archibald MacMechan, professor of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, published Headwaters of Canadian Literature, in which he sharply criticized the poetry about the Klondike Gold Rush upon which Service's reputation still rests. MacMechan, however, also praised Service's war poetry, writing, "his Rhymes of a Red Cross Man are an advance on his previous volumes. He has come into touch with the grimmest of realities; and while his radical faults have not been cured, his rude lines drive home the truth that he has seen."[108]
England
The major novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to the Napoleonic Wars, the Boer Wars and World War I, including "Drummer Hodge", "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'", "The Man He Killed" and ‘"And there was a great calm" (on the signing of the Armistice, Nov.11, 1918)’: his work had a profound influence on other war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon".[109] Hardy in these poems often used the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers and their colloquial speech.[109] A theme in the Wessex Poems (1898) is the long shadow that the Napoleonic Wars cast over the 19th century, as seen, for example, in "The Sergeant's Song" and "Leipzig". The Napoleonic War is the subject of Hardy's drama in verse The Dynasts (1904–08).[110]
At the beginning of World War I, like many other writers, Kipling wrote pamphlets and poems which enthusiastically supported the British war aims of restoring Belgium after that kingdom had been occupied by Germany together with more generalised statements that Britain was standing up for the cause of good.[111]
For the first time, a substantial number of important British poets were soldiers, writing about their experiences of war. A number of them died on the battlefield, most famously Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley. Others including Robert Graves,[112] Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon survived but were scarred by their experiences, and this was reflected in their poetry. Robert H. Ross describes the British "war poets" as Georgian poets.[113] Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected in anthologies. Several of these early anthologies were published during the war and were very popular, though the tone of the poetry changed as the war progressed. One of the wartime anthologies, The Muse in Arms, was published in 1917, and several were published in the years following the war.
David Jones' epic poem of World War I In Parenthesis was first published in England in 1937, and is based on Jones's own experience as an infantryman in the War. In Parenthesis narrates the experiences of English Private John Ball in a mixed English-Welsh regiment starting with their leaving England and ending seven months later with the assault on Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme. The work employs a mixture of lyrical verse and prose, is highly allusive, and ranges in tone from formal to Cockney colloquial and military slang. The poem won the Hawthornden Prize and the admiration of writers such as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.[114]
In November 1985, a slate memorial was unveiled in Poet's Corner commemorating 16 poets of the Great War: Richard Aldington, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Edward Thomas.[115]
For much of the Great War, G.K. Chesterton supported the British Empire's war effort against Imperial Germany. By the end of the war, however, Chesterton was singing the same tune as anti-war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
In his 1922 poem Elegy in a Country Courtyard, Chesterton wrote:
- The men that worked for England
- They have their graves at home:
- And birds and bees of England
- About the cross can roam.
- But they that fought for England,
- Following a falling star,
- Alas, alas for England
- They have their graves afar.
- And they that rule in England,
- In stately conclave met,
- Alas, alas for England,
- They have no graves as yet.
Ireland
The fact that 49,400 Irish soldiers in the British Army gave their lives fighting in the Great War remains controversial in Ireland. This is because the Easter Rising of 1916 took place during the war and the Irish War of Independence began only a few months after the 11 November Armistice. For this reason, Irish republicanism has traditionally viewed Irishmen who serve in the British military as traitors. This view became even more prevalent after 1949, when Ireland voted to become a Republic and to leave the Commonwealth. For this reason, Ireland's war poets were long neglected.[116]
One of them was Tom Kettle, a former member of the paramilitary Irish Volunteers and M.P. for the Irish Parliamentary Party. Despite his outrage over the Rape of Belgium, Kettle was very critical of the war at first. Comparing the Anglo-Irish landlord class to the aristocratic big estate owners who similarly dominated the Kingdom of Prussia, Kettle wrote, "England goes to fight for liberty in Europe and for Junkerdom in Ireland."[117]
Later, when he was serving as a Lieutenant with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Western Front, Kettle learned of the Easter Rising of 1916. After also learning of the executions of Roger Casement and sixteen of the Rising's other leaders, including every one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, Kettle wrote, "These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer."[118]
Mere months later, on 9 September 1916, Lieut. Kettle was shot in the chest during the Battle of Ginchy, in which the 16th (Irish) Division successfully captured and held the French village of the same name, which the Imperial German Army had been using as an artillery observation post during the Battle of the Somme. Lieut. Kettle's body was never found.
G. K. Chesterton later wrote, "Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit which was so ill rewarded on both sides of the channel [...] He was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the barbarians because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against England, as England a hundred years before has used the barbarians against Ireland."[119]
Lieut. Kettle's best-known poem is a sonnet, To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of God, which was written and mailed to his family just days before he was killed in action. It reads:
- "In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
- To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
- In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
- You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
- And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
- To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
- And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
- And some decry it in a knowing tone.
- So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
- And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
- Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
- Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor
- But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed
- And for the secret Scripture of the poor." [120]
When Francis Ledwidge, who was a member of the Irish Volunteers in Slane, County Meath, learned of the outbreak of the war, he decided against enlisting in the British Army. In response, the Unionist National Volunteers subjected Ledwidge to a show trial, during which they accused him of cowardice and of being pro-German.[116] Soon after, Ledwidge enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Despite his twin beliefs in socialism and Irish republicanism, Ledwidge later wrote, "I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions."[121]
Ledwidge published three volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1918, while he served at the Landing at Suvla Bay, on the Macedonian front and on the Western Front.[116]
Like Kettle, Ledwidge was also deeply moved by the executions that followed the Easter Rising of 1916 and eulogized the 17 executed Republican leaders in his poems O’Connell Street, Lament for Thomas MacDonagh, Lament for the Poets of 1916, and in the Aisling poem The Dead Kings.
During a major rainstorm on the early morning of 31 July 1917, Ledwidge's battalion was laying beech-wood road planks in the boggy soil near the village of Boezinge, Belgium, in preparation for an imminent Allied offensive that would become known as the Battle of Passchendaele.
Shortly after the Fusiliers, who were soaked to the skin, were permitted a short break and issued hot tea, a German long-range artillery shell landed next to Ledwidge, who was killed instantly.
A Roman Catholic military chaplain, Father Devas, was the first on the scene. That night, Father Devas wrote in his diary, "Crowds at Holy Communion. Arranged for service but washed out by rain and fatigues. Walk in rain with dogs. Ledwidge killed, blown to bits; at Confession yesterday and Mass and Holy Communion this morning. R.I.P."[122]
Francis Ledwidge was buried at Carrefour-de-Rose, and later re-interred in the nearby Artillery Wood Military Cemetery, near Boezinge, Belgium.
A monument to him, topped by the Irish tricolour, now stands on the site of his death.[123] A stone tablet in honour of Francis Ledwidge also stands at the Island of Ireland Peace Park, near Messines, Belgium.
William Butler Yeats' first war poem was "On being asked for a War Poem" written on 6 February 1915, in response to a request from Henry James for a political poem about World War I.[124] Yeats changed the poem's title from "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" to "A Reason for Keeping Silent" before sending it in a letter to James, which Yeats wrote at Coole Park on 20 August 1915.[125] When it was later reprinted the title was changed to "On being asked for a War Poem".[126]
Yeats' most famous war poem is An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, which is a soliloquy by Major Robert Gregory, an Irish nationalist flying ace who was also a friend of Yeats, and the son of Anglo-Irish landlord Sir William Henry Gregory and Yeats' patroness Lady Augusta Gregory.
Maj. Gregory, who had enlisted in the Connaught Rangers despite being overage and having three children, transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, where he was eventually credited with eight victories.[127] Even though his fellow Irishmen Mick Mannock and George McElroy, with many more victories, have become much better known, Maj. Gregory was the first Irish pilot to achieve flying ace status in the RFC. The Third French Republic made him a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur in 1917, and he was awarded a Military Cross for "conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty."[128]
Maj. Robert Gregory was killed in action on 23 January 1918, when his Sopwith Camel crashed near Padua, Italy. Royal Flying Corps records in the British National Archives allege that Maj. Gregory was "sshot down in error by an Italian pilot", a claim that has been repeated by both Yeats' and Lady Gregory's biographers. In 2017, Geoffrey O'Byrne White, the director of the Irish Aviation Authority, a distant cousin of Major Gregory, and a former pilot with the Irish Air Corps, said he believed his relative had become incapacitated at high altitude due to an inoculation that morning against influenza.[129]
At the beginning of Yeats' poem, Maj. Gregory predicts his imminent death in an aerial dogfight. He declares that he does not hate the Germans he fights against or love the British whom he fights for. He comments that his countrymen are the poor Irish Catholic tenants of his mother's estate at Kiltartan, County Galway, that they will not mourn his death, and that his passing will have done nothing to improve their lives. He comments that he signed up to fight not for law, duty, the speeches of politicians, or the cheering crowds, but for, "a lonely impulse of delight."
Wishing to show restraint from publishing a political poem during the height of the Great War, Yeats withheld publication of An Irish Airman Foresees His Death until after the 1918 Armistice.[130]
"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War[131] and at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, which followed the Easter Rising of 1916, but before David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Ireland.[132] The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse, the Antichrist, and the Second Coming to allegorise the state of Europe during the Interwar Period.[133]
Scotland
When the war began, Scotland was filled with patriotic euphoria and an enormous number of young men rushed up to enlist in the armed forces. During the First World War, kilt-wearing soldiers from the Scottish regiments were dubbed, "Die Damen aus der Hölle" ("The Ladies from Hell") by the soldiers of the Imperial German Army on the Western Front.[134][135] In the 1996 memoir The Sea Hunters: True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks, American author and explorer Clive Cussler revealed that his father, Eric Edward Cussler, served with the Imperial German Army on the Western Front during World War I. In later years, Eric Cussler used to tell his son that French Poilus were, "mediocre fighters", that British Tommies were, "tenacious bulldogs", and that American Doughboys, were, "real scrappers." Eric Cussler always added, however, "But my German comrades took anything they could all dish out. It was only when we heard the bagpipes from, 'The Ladies from Hell,' that we oozed cold sweat and knew a lot of us wouldn't be going home for Christmas."[136]
Despite their effectiveness, however, the Scottish regiments suffered horrendous losses on the battlefield, which included many poets who wrote in English, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic.
In 1914, Scottish poet Charles Sorley, a native of Aberdeen, was living in Imperial Germany and attending the University of Jena. He later recalled that when the war began, his first feelings of patriotism were towards Germany. After being briefly interned as an enemy alien at Trier and ordered to leave the country, Sorley returned to Great Britain and enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment as a lieutenant. He was killed by a German sniper during the Battle of Loos in 1915 and his poems and letters were published posthumously.
Robert Graves described Charles Sorley in Goodbye to All That as "one of the three poets of importance killed during the war". (The other two being Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.) Sorley believed that Germans and British were equally blind to each other's humanity and his anti-war poetry stands in direct contrast to the romantic idealism about the war that appears in the poems of Rupert Brooke, Walter Flex, and Alan Seeger.
The Scottish Gaelic poet John Munro, a native of Swordale on the Isle of Lewis, won the Military Cross while serving as a 2nd Lieutenant with the Seaforth Highlanders and was ultimately killed in action during the 1918 Spring Offensive. Lt. Munro, writing under the pseudonym Iain Rothach, came to be ranked by critics alongside the major war poets. Tragically, only three of his poems are known to survive. They are Ar Tir ("Our Land"), Ar Gaisgich a Thuit sna Blàir ("Our Heroes Who Fell in Battle"), and Air sgàth nan sonn ("For the Sake of the Warriors").[137] Derick Thomson – the venerable poet and Professor of Celtic Studies at Glasgow – hailed Munro's work in his Companion to Gaelic Scotland as being: "the first strong voice of the new Gaelic verse of the 20th century".
Ronald Black has written that Munro's three poems leave behind, "his thoughts on his fallen comrades in tortured free verse full of reminiscence-of-rhyme; forty more years were to pass before free verse became widespread in Gaelic."[138]
Pàdraig Moireasdan, a Scottish Gaelic bard and seanchaidh from Grimsay, North Uist, served in the Lovat Scouts during World War I. He served in the Gallipoli Campaign, in the Macedonian front, and on the Western Front. In later years, Moireasdan, who ultimately reached the rank of corporal, loved to tell how he fed countless starving Allied soldiers in Thessalonica by making a quern. Corporal Moireasdan composed many poems and songs during the war, including Òran don Chogadh (A Song to the War"), which he composed while serving at Gallipoli.[139]
In 1969, Gairm, a publishing house based in Glasgow and specializing in Scottish Gaelic literature, posthumously published the first book of collected poems by Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna. The poet, who had died two years previously in the hospital at Lochmaddy on the island of North Uist, was a combat veteran of the King's Own Cameron Highlanders during World War I and highly talented poet in Gaelic.
According to Ronald Black, "Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna is the outstanding Gaelic poet of the trenches. His best known song An Eala Bhàn ("The White Swan") was produced there for home consumption, but in a remarkable series of ten other compositions he describes what it looked, felt, sounded and even smelt like to march up to the front, to lie awake on the eve of battle, to go over the top, to be gassed, to wear a mask, to be surrounded by the dead and dying remains of Gaelic-speaking comrades, and so on. Others of his compositions contain scenes of deer hunting, a symbolically traditional pursuit of which he happened to be passionately fond, and which he continued to practice all his life."[138]
Unlike Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dòmhnall Ruadh believed himself to be fighting a just war against a terrible enemy. The Bard's anger over the futility of the war only boiled over after the Armistice.
According to John A. Macpherson, "After the war, Dòmhnall Ruadh returned home to Corùna, but although he was thankful to be alive, he was, like most other returning soldiers, disillusioned. The land which they had been promised was as securely held by the landlords as it had ever been, and so were the hunting and fishing rights."[140]
Many years later, Dòmhnall expressed his feelings about the years that followed the war in his poem, Caochladh Suigheachadh na Duthcha ("Changed Days"). He recalled the poverty of his youth and how he and his fellow Gaels went away to war and frustrated the Kaiser's war aims at a truly unspeakable cost in lives. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Scottish landlords of the Highlands and Islands stayed home and got richer. He recalled how after the war there was no work and how the Gaels emigrated from Scotland to all corners of the world. For those who stayed, there was no food except what was grown and ground by hand and supplemented by occasional discreet defiance of the landlords' bans on hunting and fishing.[141]
Dòmhnall used to often say of those same years, "If it weren't for the gun and what I poached, it would have been dire poverty."[142]
In his poem Dhan Gàidhlig ("For Gaelic"), Dòmhnall urged his fellow Gaels to "forget English", saying he had no use for it. He urged his listeners to remember their warrior ancestors from the Scottish clans, who never gave way in battle while there was still a head on their shoulders. Dòmhmnall compared Gaelic to a tree that had lost its branches and leaves. But he said that if people were to dig and weed around the base of its trunk, the tree would grow again and spread its leaves and branches. Dòmhnall expressed the hope that the descendants of the Gaels who were evicted during the Highland Clearances would return from around the world to hear from those who had stayed how heartlessly the landlords treated their ancestors. Dòmhnall also expressed a vision of the Scottish Gaeldom prosperous and teeming with children and how sheep, with which the landlords replaced those whom they evicted, would be replaced with Highland cattle. Dòmhnall concluded by predicting that the women in the milking fold will sing Gaelic songs and recite Gaelic poems as they work.[143]
Dòmhnall Ruadh's poetry proved very popular and began being used to teach Gaelic in the schools of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. An expanded and bilingual edition was published by the Historical Society of North Uist in 1995. In 2016, Scottish Gaelic folk singer and North Uist native Julie Fowlis performed Dòmhnall Ruadh's wartime love song An Eala Bhàn ("The White Swan") at the Thiepval Memorial on the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. Five senior members of the British Royal Family, Prince Charles, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, were in attendance.
Wales
At the outbreak of World War I, the vast majority of the Welsh populace were against being involved in the war. Throughout World War I, voluntary enlistment by Welshmen remained low and conscription was ultimately enacted in Wales to ensure a steady supply of new recruits into the armed forces.[144] The war particularly left Welsh non-conformist chapels deeply divided. Traditionally, the Nonconformists had not been comfortable at all with the idea of warfare. The war saw a major clash within Welsh Nonconformism between those who backed military service and those who adopted Christian pacifism.[145]
The most famous Welsh-language war poet remains Private Ellis Humphrey Evans of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, who is best known under his bardic name of Hedd Wyn.
Born in the village of Trawsfynydd, Wales, Evans wrote much of his poetry while working as a shepherd on his family's hill farm. His style, which was influenced by romantic poetry, was dominated by themes of nature and religion. He also wrote several war poems following the outbreak of war on the Western Front in 1914. Like many other Welsh nonconformists, Hedd Wyn was a Christian pacifist and refused to enlist in the armed forces, feeling that he could never kill anyone.[146]
The war, however, inspired some of Hedd Wyn's most noted poems, including Plant Trawsfynydd ("Children of Trawsfynydd"), Y Blotyn Du ("The Black Dot"), and Nid â’n Ango ("[It] Will Not Be Forgotten"). His poem, Rhyfel ("War"), remains one of his most frequently quoted works.
Gwae fi fy myw mewn oes mor ddreng, | Why must I live in this grim age, |
Although farm work was classed as a reserved occupation, in 1916 the Evans family was ordered to send one of their sons to sign up for conscription. The 29-year-old Ellis enlisted rather than his younger brother Robert. In February 1917, he received his training at Litherland Camp, Liverpool.
In June 1917, Hedd Wyn joined the 15th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers (part of the 38th (Welsh) Division) at Fléchin, France. His arrival depressed him, as exemplified in his quote, "Heavy weather, heavy soul, heavy heart. That is an uncomfortable trinity, isn't it?" Nevertheless, at Fléchin he finished his awdl Yr Arwr ("The Hero"), his submission to the National Eisteddfod of Wales, and signed it "Fleur de Lis". It is believed it was sent via the Royal Mail around the end of June.
The Battle of Passchendaele began at 3:50 a.m. on 31 July 1917, with heavy bombardment of German lines. However, the troops' advance was hampered by very effective German artillery and machine gun fire, and by heavy rain which turned the battlefield into a swamp.
Private Evans, as part of the 15th (Service) Battalion (1st London Welsh), was advancing towards an Imperial German Army strongpoint –created within the ruins of the Belgian hamlet of Hagebos ("Iron Cross")– when he was mortally wounded by shrapnel from a German nose cap shell.[148]
Hedd Wyn was carried by stretcher bearers to a first-aid post. Still conscious, he asked the doctor, "Do you think I will live?" though it was clear that he had little chance of surviving; he died at about 11:00 a.m. on 31 July 1917.
Just a few weeks later, Hedd Wyn's awdl, Yr Arwr ("The Hero"), was posthumously awarded the Chair before a weeping audience at the National Eisteddfod of Wales. The Bardic Chair was delivered to the farmhouse of the Bard's parents draped in a black sheet. Ever since, the 1917 National Eisteddfod has been referred to as "Eisteddfod y Gadair Ddu" ("The Eisteddfod of the Black Chair").
Ellis H. Evans was buried at Artillery Wood Cemetery, near Boezinge, Belgium.[149] After a petition was submitted to the Imperial War Graves Commission, his headstone was given the additional words Y Prifardd Hedd Wyn (English: "The Chief Bard, Hedd Wyn").
Albert Evans-Jones, a Welsh poet born in Pwllheli and who had graduated from the University College of North Wales at Bangor, served on the Salonica front and on the Western Front as a RAMC ambulance man and later as a military chaplain. After the war, he became a minister for the Presbyterian Church of Wales and wrote many poems that shocked the Welsh population with their graphic descriptions of the horrors of the trenches and their savage attacks on wartime ultra-nationalism. Also, in his work as Archdruid of the National Eisteddfod, Rev. Evans-Jones altered the traditional rituals, which were based in 18th century Celtic neopaganism, to better reflect the Christian beliefs of the Welsh people.
Rev. Evans-Jones, whom Alan Llwyd considers the greatest Welsh poet of the Great War, is best known under the bardic name of Cynan.
Welsh poet Alan Llwyd's English translations of many poems by both poets appear in the volume Out of the Fire of Hell; Welsh Experience of the Great War 1914–1918 in Prose and Verse. Among the most striking is the poem that follows:
- Ballade by the War Memorial.
- (A Speech that would not be heard on Armistice Day).
- By Alfred Evans-Jones.
- Translated by Alan Llwyd.
- From ghostly realms I come, a shade,
- On your dead sons' behalf, to see
- What honour, praise, or accolade:
- We would return to, not that we
- Would wish for your false eulogy.
- But what is this? – the old, old lie
- On stones to shame our memory:
- "For one's own land, it's sweet to die."
- When the wild heart of youth was made
- Tame by the clumsy artistry
- Of some rough blacksmith's bayonet blade
- Or the hot bullet's ecstasy,
- Or when the shells whined endlessly,
- And then became a colder cry,
- Would you still sing so joyously:
- "For one's own land, it's sweet to die?
- But it is sweet to be dismayed
- On seeing those whom we made free
- Through war grown wealthy, while, betrayed,
- My friends who fought for victory
- Now starve: I'd break these stones to be
- Bread for old comrades of days gone by
- While you still sing with so much glee:
- "For one's own land it's sweet to die."
- L' Envoi.
- Friend, in the colours of the O.T.C.,
- One day you will remember why
- I challenged such hypocrisy:
- "For one's own land, it's sweet to die." [150]
United States
The United States only entered the Great War in May 1917. By that time, the mass mechanized slaughter at the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele, which still haunt the other combatant nations, had already taken place.
By the time large numbers of soldiers from the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.) arrived in France, they faced an Imperial German Army that was starving, exhausted, and which had already been bled white by three years of war. Furthermore, the German people were being systematically starved by a Royal Navy blockade and were increasingly on the brink of overthrowing the Monarchy. Although American Doughboys helped stem the 1918 Spring Offensive, captured Chipilly Ridge during the Battle of Amiens, won the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, and saved the Allies from having to contract a negotiated peace with the Central Powers, America's losses were far fewer than those of the other combatant nations, which lost an entire generation of young men. For this reason, World War I is a forgotten war in America today.
Although World War I in American literature is widely believed to begin and end with Ernest Hemingway's war novel A Farewell to Arms, there were also American war poets.
Alan Seeger, the uncle of songwriter Pete Seeger, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion while America was still neutral and became the first great American poet of the First World War. Seeger's poems, which passionately urged the American people to join the Allied cause, were widely publicized and remained popular.
In the end, Seeger was killed in action on 4 July 1916, during the French Army's attack against the trenches of the Imperial German Army at Belloy-en-Santerre, during the Battle of the Somme.[151] His fellow French Foreign Legion soldier, Rif Baer, later described Seeger's last moments: "His tall silhouette stood out on the green of the cornfield. He was the tallest man in his section. His head erect, and pride in his eye, I saw him running forward, with bayonet fixed. Soon he disappeared and that was the last time I saw my friend."[152][153] As he lay mortally wounded in no man's land, Seeger cheered on the passing soldiers of the legion until he died of his injuries.[154]
In the United States, Alan Seeger's death was greeted with national mourning. Alan Seeger is sometimes called, "The American Rupert Brooke."
According to former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, decades after Alan Seeger's death, his poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death, was a great favorite of her husband, U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who often asked her to read it aloud to him.[155]
Joyce Kilmer, who was widely considered America's leading Roman Catholic poet and apologist and who was often compared to G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, enlisted mere days after the United States entered World War I. In August 1917, Kilmer was transferred to the traditionally Irish-American regiment of the New York National Guard known as "The Fighting 69th", of the 42nd "Rainbow" Division. Kilmer quickly rose to the rank of sergeant. Though he was eligible for an officer's commission, Kilmer refused all offered promotions, saying that he would rather be a sergeant in the Fighting 69th than an officer in any other regiment.[156]:p.35
Shortly before his deployment to Europe, Kilmer's daughter Rose died, and twelve days later, his son Christopher was born.[156]:p.32 Before his departure, Kilmer had contracted with publishers to write a book about the war, deciding upon the title Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth.[157] Kilmer never completed the book; however, toward the end of the year, he did find time to write prose sketches and war poetry. The most famous of Kilmer's war poems is "Rouge Bouquet" (1918) which commemorates the victims of a German artillery barrage against American trenches in the Rouge Bouquet forest, near Baccarat, on the afternoon of 7 March 1918. 21 Doughboys from Kilmer's Regiment were buried alive by the barrage and 19 were killed (of whom 14 remain entombed).[158][159][160]:p.350
On 30 July 1918, Sgt. Kilmer, whose coolness under enemy fire was legendary in the regiment, volunteered for a military intelligence mission led by Major William J. Donovan, the future head of the Office of Strategic Services, behind enemy lines during the Second Battle of the Marne. While leading a patrol that was attempting to locate a concealed German machine gun nest, Sgt. Kilmer was shot through the head by a German sniper at the Muercy Farm, beside the Ourcq River and near the village of Seringes-et-Nesles. Sgt. Joyce Kilmer was only 31-years old[161] and was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre by the Government of the Third French Republic.[162]
Sgt. Joyce Kilmer lies buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, near Fere-en-Tardenois, Aisne, Picardy, which is located just across the road and stream from where he was killed.[163] A Tridentine Requiem Mass was offered for the repose of his soul at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City on 14 October 1918.[164]
According to Dana Gioia, however, "None of Kilmer's wartime verses are read today; his reputation survives on poems written before he enlisted."[68]
In 1928, American poet and World War I veteran of the A.E.F. John Allan Wyeth published This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets.
B.J. Omanson recalls of his first encounter with the collection, "Wyeth's sequence... was over fifty sonnets long and, reading through just a few of them at random, indicated that not only were they highly skilled, but unusually innovative as well. What was most exciting was that they were written, not in an elevated, formal tone, but in a cool, concise, dispassionate voice, spiced with slangy soldiers' dialogue, French villagers' patois, and filled with as many small particulars of life as any of the finest soldier-diaries I had read."[165]
The collection, which is written in an experimental form truly unique in the 800-year history of the sonnet, traces Wyeth's service as a 2nd Lieutenant and military intelligence officer assigned to the 33rd U.S. Infantry Division from receiving orders at Camp Upton to embark on a troop transport bound for France, during the ocean voyage, and through his journey into the firing line. At the time of his enlistment, Wyeth fluently spoke and read several languages and was a recent graduate of Princeton University, where his circle of friends had included Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
On 8 August 1918, the first day of the Battle of Amiens, was later described by General Erich Ludendorff as "Der Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres" ("The blackest day of the German Army"). Enormous numbers of German enlisted men, whose will to continue fighting had been shattered, surrendered voluntarily or retreated en masse. German officers who tried to rally their men were showered with the kind of insults union members usually reserved for strikebreakers and were accused of trying to needlessly prolong the war. However, the otherwise rapid Allied advance ran into a very serious obstacle; "a bare seventy-five-foot-high ridge" in an oxbow bend of the Somme River near the village of Chipilly.
The German soldiers on Chipilly Ridge were able to command a wide field to the south of the Somme River and poured forth devastating machine gun and artillery fire that kept the Australian Corps pinned down at Le Hamel. The job of taking Chipilly Ridge was assigned to 3 Battalions of Doughboys from Wyeth's Division.[166]
According to B.J. Omanson, "Their attack took place at 5:30 p.m.and, despite heavy machine gun and artillery fire pouring down on them from Chipilly Ridge, the Americans could not be driven back. They repeatedly pressed the assault until the northern half of the ridge and southern end of nearby Gressaire Wood were taken. Continuing the assault the following day, they took the rest of Gressaire Wood and by day's end were in possession of seven hundred German prisoners, thirty artillery pieces, one aircraft, and more than one hundred machine guns."[167]
During the assault on Chipilly Ridge, Corporal Jake Allex, a Serbian immigrant from Kosovo, took command of his platoon after all the other officers had been killed. Corporal Allex led them in an attack against a German machine gun nest, during which he personally killed five enemy soldiers and took fifteen prisoners. For his actions during the assault on Chipilly Ridge, Corporal Allex became the second American soldier to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War I.[168][169]
On the night of 8–9 August 1918, as the assault on Chipilly Ridge was just beginning, Lieuts. Wyeth and Thomas J. Cochrane were assigned to deliver sealed orders from Division HQ at Molliens-au-Bois to the Field Headquarters of all three Battalions engaged in the attack. The precise location of each Battalion was unknown, but they were believed to be somewhere along the northern bank of the Somme River, near the village of Sailly-le-Sec. In his 1928 poetry collection, Wyeth described every phase of the mission in his six interlinked "Chipilly Ridge sonnets."[170]
According to Bradley J. Omanson, "Lt. Wyeth, as it happened, was a cultured man, a recent Princeton graduate in languages and literature, and he rendered his experiences of that night into an accomplished, highly original cycle of six linked sonnets – part of a much longer cycle of over fifty sonnets which covered the entirety of his service in the war. But it is this self-contained six-sonnet sequence in particular – describing one soldier's stumblings through the metaphoric valley of death – which delves most memorably into the nature of war."[171]
On the afternoon of 14 September 1918, while the men of the 33rd U.S. Division were stationed at Fromereville near Verdun, Wyeth was taking a shower with a group of bickering Doughboys when he heard the cry, "Air Raid!" Like every other bather, Wyeth ran, naked and covered with soap, into the village square. There, he watched as a Fokker D VII, flown by Unteroffizier Hans Heinrich Marwede from Jasta 67's aerodrome at Marville, attacked and set on fire three French observation balloons.[172] Lieut. Wyeth later described Marwede's victory in his sonnet Fromereville: War in Heaven.[173]
Although John Allan Wyeth's This Man's Army was highly praised by American literary critics, the 1929 Stock Market Crash soon followed its publication and, with the onset of the Great Depression, Wyeth's poetry was forgotten. When John Allan Wyeth died in Skillman, New Jersey on 11 May 1981, his obituary made no mention of the fact that he had been a poet.
According to B.J. Omanson and Dana Gioia, who rescued Wyeth's poetry from oblivion during the early 21st century, Wyeth is the only American poet of the First World War who can withstand comparison with English war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen. B.J. Omanson has also found that every event that Wyeth relates in his sonnets, down to the way he describes the weather, can be verified by other eyewitness accounts as completely accurate.
In response to the 2008 re-publication of The Man's Army, British literary critic Jon Stallworthy, the editor of The Oxford Book of War Poetry and the biographer of Wilfred Owen, wrote, "At long last, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, an American poet takes his place in the front rank of the War Poet's parade."[174]
Inspired by Canadian poet John McCrae's famous poem In Flanders Fields, American poet Moina Michael resolved at the war's conclusion in 1918 to wear a red poppy year-round to honour the millions of soldiers who had died in the Great War. She also wrote a poem in response called We Shall Keep the Faith.[175] She distributed silk poppies to her peers and campaigned to have them adopted by the American Legion as an official symbol of remembrance. At the 1920 convention, the American Legion formally adopted Michael's proposal of adopting Remembrance poppies as a national symbol.[176]
La guerra civil rusa
During the Russian Civil War, the Russian Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote the sonnet sequence "Poems for a Time of Troubles."
Between 1917 and 1922, Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, whose husband Sergei Efron was serving as an officer in the anti-communist Volunteer Army, wrote the epic verse cycle Lebedinyi stan (The Encampment of the Swans) about the civil war, glorifying the anti-communist soldiers of the White Movement. The cycle of poems is in the style of a diary or journal and begins on the day of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917, and ends late in 1920, when the Whites had been completely defeated. The 'swans' of the title refers to the volunteer soldiers of the White Army. In 1922, Tsvetaeva also published a lengthy monarchist fairy tale in verse, Tsar-devitsa ("Tsar-Maiden").
On the other side, Osip Mandelstam wrote many poems praising the Red Army and rebuking the Whites, whom he referred to in one poem as, "October's withered leaves." In the end, however, Mandelstam, who believed deeply in the tradition that poets are the conscience of the Russian people, died in the Gulag in 1938, after being arrested for composing an epigram that both attacked and mocked Stalin.
La guerra Civil española
The Spanish Civil War produced a substantial volume[177] of poetry in English (as well as in Spanish). There were English-speaking poets serving in the Spanish Civil War on both sides. Among those fighting with the Republicans as volunteers in the International Brigades were Clive Branson, John Cornford, Charles Donnelly, Alex McDade and Tom Wintringham.[178]
On the Nationalist side, the most famous English-language poet of the Spanish Civil War remains South African poet Roy Campbell. Campbell was living in Toledo with his family when hostilities started. As a recent convert to the Roman Catholic Church, Campbell was horrified to witness the systematic religious persecution and mass murder of Catholics by the Republican forces. A particularly chilling moment for Campbell was when he came across the bodies of Toledo's Carmelite monks, whom he had befriended, after Republican forces had subjected them to execution without trial. The monks' executioner's had then written in blood above their bodies, "Thus strikes the CHEKA." Campbell later retold the execution in his poem The Carmelites of Toledo and pointed out the role that the massacres of Toledo's priests, laity, and religious played in causing the city's Spanish Army garrison to turn against the Republic and to keep fighting during the Siege of the Alcázar. Of Campbell's other poems about the War, the best are the sonnets Hot Rifles, Christ in Uniform, The Alcazar Mined, and Toledo 1936.[179]
According to Campbell's biographer, Joseph Pearce, and his daughters Anna and Tess, Campbell's pro-Nationalist stance has caused him, in an early version of cancel culture, to be inaccurately labeled as a Fascist and left out of poetry anthologies and college courses.
In Afrikaans literature, the best poet of the Spanish Civil War is Uys Krige, who was born at Bontebokskloof near Swellendam in Cape Province and who sided with the Second Spanish Republic. Krige eventually published The Hymn of the Fascist Bombers, which outraged both extreme Afrikaner nationalists and the Catholic Church in South Africa.
Despite their disagreement over the war in Spain, however, Campbell and Krige remained close friends and, in later years, worked together as activists against the rule of the White Supremacist National Party and its policy of Apartheid in their native South Africa.
The best Spanish-language poets of the Civil War are Federico García Lorca and the Machado brothers. Antonio Machado wrote a poem to honor the Communist General Enrique Líster,[180] and died a refugee in France after the defeat of the Republic. Meanwhile, his brother, Manuel Machado, dedicated a poem to the saber of the Nationalist Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda became intensely politicised for the first time during the Spanish Civil War. As a result of his experiences in Spain, Neruda became an ardent Communist and remained one for the rest of his life. The radical leftist politics of his literary friends were contributing factors, but the most important catalyst was the abduction and execution without trial of the Republican poet Federico García Lorca by Nationalist soldiers.[181] By means of his speeches and writings, Neruda threw his support behind the Second Spanish Republic, publishing the collection España en el corazón (Spain in Our Hearts) in 1938. He lost his post as Chilean consul due to his refusal to remain politically neutral.[181]
Segunda Guerra Mundial
Poland
The Second Polish Republic is sometimes referred to as the country that lost the Second World War twice: first to Adolf Hitler and then to Joseph Stalin. Not surprisingly, Poland's war, both in conventionial and guerrilla warfare, continued to inspire poetry long after all fighting had ceased.
Czesław Miłosz has since written, "Before World War II, Polish poets did not differ much in their interests and problems from their colleagues in France and Holland. The specific features of Polish literature notwithstanding, Poland belonged to the same cultural circuit as other European countries. Thus one can say that what occurred in Poland was the encounter of a European poet with the hell of the twentieth century, not hell's first circle, but a much deeper one. This situation is something of a laboratory, in other words: it allows us to examine what happens to modern poetry in certain historical conditions."[182]
After SS General Jürgen Stroop suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, anti-Nazi Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote the poem Campo dei Fiore. In the poem, Miłosz compared the burning of the Ghetto and its 60,0000 inhabitants to the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition in 1600. Miłosz criticized the Polish people for just going on with their daily routines while the Ghetto was burning. He ended by urging his listeners and readers to feel outraged over the Holocaust in Poland and to join the Polish Resistance in their fight against the Nazi Occupiers.
Also in response to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, poet Hirsh Glick, who was imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto, wrote the Yiddish poem Zog Nit Keynmol, in which he urged his fellow Jews to take up arms against Nazi Germany, instead of dying peacefully like six-million lambs. Despite Glick's own murder by the SS in 1944, Zog Nit Keynmol was set to music and widely adopted by Jewish partisans as an anthem of resistance against the Holocaust. For this reason Zog Nit Keynmol is still sung at memorial services around the world on Yom HaShoah.
In 1974, Anna Świrszczyńska published the poetry collection Budowałam barykadę ("Building the Barricade"), about her experiences as both a combatant and battlefield nurse during the 1944 Warsaw uprising, in which the Armia Krajowa, acting under orders from the Polish Government in Exile in London, tried to liberate Poland's pre-war capital city from the occupying Germans before Joseph Stalin's Red Army could do so. Instead, Soviet soldiers waited across the Vistula River for more than two months and calmly watched as the Polish combatants were slaughtered en masse by the combined forces of the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Waffen SS. Then, by order of Adolf Hitler, the entire city of Warsaw was burned to the ground.
Czesław Miłosz later wrote about Świrszczyńska, "In August and September of 1944, she took part in the Warsaw Uprising. For sixty-three days she witnessed and participated in a battle waged by a city of one million people against tanks, planes, and heavy artillery. The city was destroyed gradually, street by street, and those who survived were deported. Many years later, Świrszczyńska tried to reconstruct that tragedy in her poems: the building of barricades, the basement hospitals, the bombed houses caving in burying the people in shelters, the lack of ammunition, food, and bandages, and her own adventures as a military nurse. Yet these attempts of hers did not succeed: they were too wordy, too pathetic, and she destroyed her manuscripts. (Also, for a long time the Uprising was a forbidden topic, in view of Russia's role in crushing it). No less than thirty years after the event did she hit upon a style that satisfied her. Curiously enough, that was the style of miniature, which she had discovered in her youth, but this time not applied to paintings. Her book Building the Barricades consists of very short poems, without meter or rhyme, each one a microreport on a single incident or situation."[183]
About one Świrszczyńska poem set during the Uprising, Miłosz writes, "The small poem, A Woman Said to her Neighbor, contains a whole way of life, the life in the basements of the incessantly bombed and shelled city. Those basements were connected by passages bored through the walls to form an underground city of catacombs. The motions and habits accepted in normal conditions were reevaluated there. Money meant less than food, which was usually obtained by expeditions to the firing line; considerable value was attached to cigarettes, used as a medium of exchange; human relations also departed from what we are used to considering the norm and were stripped of all appearances, reduced to their basest shape. It is possible that in this poem we are moved by the analogy with peacetime conditions, for men and women are often drawn together not from mutual affection but from their fear of loneliness:
- "A woman said to her neighbor:
- 'Since my husband was killed I can't sleep,
- I tremble all night long under the blanket.
- I'll go crazy if I have to be alone today,
- I have some cigarettes my husband left, please,
- Do drop in tonight.'" [184]
Hungary
Hungarian Jewish poet and Roman Catholic convert Miklós Radnóti was a vocal critic of the Pro-German Governments of Admiral Miklós Horthy and of the Arrow Cross Party.
According to Radnóti's English translator Frederick Turner, "One day, one of Radnóti's friends saw him on the streets of Budapest, and the poet was mumbling something like, 'Du-duh-du-duh-du-duh,' and his friend said, 'Don't you understand?! Hitler is invading Poland!' And Radnóti supposedly answered, 'Yes, but this is the only thing I have to fight with.' As his poetry makes clear, Radnóti believed that Fascism was the destruction of order. It both destroyed and vulgarized civil society. It was as if you wanted to create an ideal cat, so you took your cat, killed it, removed its flesh, put it into some kind of mold, and then pressed it into the shape of a cat. That's what Fascism does, and that's what Communism does. They both destroy an intricate social order to set up a criminally simple-minded order."[185]
Like many other Hungarians of Jewish descent or "unreliable" political views, Radnóti was drafted into a forced labor battalion by the Royal Hungarian Army during World War II. During this experience of slave labor in the copper mines of Occupied Yugoslavia, Radnóti continued to compose new poems, which he wrote down in a small notebook that he had purchased. In the last days of the Second World War, Radnóti fell ill during a forced march from Bor towards Nazi Austria.
In early November 1944, along with 21 other sick and emaciated prisoners, Radnóti was separated from the march near the Hungarian city of Győr. They were taken in a cart by three NCOs of the Royal Hungarian Army first to a village hospital, and then to a school that housed refugees. Both the hospital and the school, however, insisted that they had no room for Jews.
Between 6 and 10 November 1944, the three NCOs took the 22 Jewish prisoners to the dam near Abda, where they were forced to dig their own mass grave. Each prisoner was then shot in the base of the neck and buried. After the end of the war, the mass grave was re-exhumed and Radnóti's last five poems were found in the dirty, bloodstained notebook in his pocket. Miklós Radnóti was reburied in Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest. After the death of his wife in 2013, she was buried next to him.
Since his murder, Radnóti has become widely recognized as one of the greatest Hungarian-language poets of the 20th century. His English translator Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, who carried a volume of Radnóti's poems with her when she fled across the Austrian border after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, has written that Radnóti's verses have been translated into Hebrew, English, and many other European and Asian languages. His importance to 20th-century poetry, to Hungarian literature, and to the literature of the Holocaust in Hungary resulted in Oszsváth and Turner's own collaboration, which was assisted by the poet's widow, and which resulted in the 1992 collection Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti.
Italy
The 2005 poem Cephalonia, by Italian poet Luigi Ballerini, is about the 1943 Massacre of the Acqui Division, in which more than 5,000 officers and enlisted men of the Royal Italian Army were shot without trial on the island of Cephalonia in Occupied Greece by German and Austrian soldiers of the Wehrmacht. After learning of the King of Italy's successful coup d'etat against dictator Benito Mussolini and the Italian Armistice with the Allies, the Acqui Division had chosen to fight against their former allies under orders from the new Italian Government. In modern Greece, the Italian victims of the massacre, one of countless other un-prosecuted War crimes of the Wehrmacht, are referred to as, "The Martyrs of Cephalonia."
The poet's father, Raffaele Costantino Edoardo Ballerini, known as Ettore, was a soldier in the Acqui Division who was killed in action fighting against the Wehrmacht in the battle that preceded the massacre.[186]
Soviet Union
During World War II, Anna Akhmatova witnessed the 900-day Siege of Leningrad and read her poems over the radio to encourage the city's defenders. In 1940, Akhmatova started her Poem without a Hero, finishing a first draft in Tashkent, but working on "The Poem" for twenty years and considering it to be the major work of her life, dedicating it to "the memory of its first audience – my friends and fellow citizens who perished in Leningrad during the siege".[187]
After the war, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin was stunned to see Akhmatova given a standing ovation by Russians who remembered her wartime broadcasts. Stalin gave orders to find out who organized the standing ovation and launched a campaign of blacklisting and defamation against the poetess, in which she was called, "Half harlot, half nun."
In the 1974 poem Prussian Nights, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a former captain in the Red Army during World War II, graphically describes Soviet war crimes in East Prussia. The narrator, a Red Army officer, approves of his troops' looting and rapes against German civilians as revenge for German war crimes in the Soviet Union and he hopes to take part in the atrocities himself. The poem describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers had mistaken for a German.[188] According to a review for The New York Times, Solzhenitsyn wrote the poem in trochaic tetrameter, "in imitation of, and argument with the most famous Russian war poem, Aleksandr Tvardovsky's Vasili Tyorkin."[189]
Serbia
Amongst Serbian poets during World War II, the most notable is Desanka Maksimović. She is well known for "Krvava bajka" or "A Bloody Fairy Tale". The poem is about a group of schoolchildren in Occupied Yugoslavia who fall victim to the 1941 Wehrmacht war crime known as the Kragujevac massacre.[190]
Finland
Yrjö Jylhä published a poetry collection in 1951 about the Winter War, in which Finland fought against Joseph Stalin and the invading Red Army. The name of the collection was Kiirastuli (Purgatory).
British Empire and Commonwealth
England
By World War II the role of "war poet" was so well-established in the public mind, and it was anticipated that the outbreak of war in 1939 would produce a literary response equal to that of the First World War. The Times Literary Supplement went so far as to pose the question in 1940: "Where are the war-poets?"[191] Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas are the standard critical choices amongst British war poets of this time.[192] In 1942, Henry Reed published a collection of three poems about British infantry training entitled Lessons of the War; three more were added after the war.[193] Sidney Keyes was another important and prolific Second World War poet.[191]
Ireland
Despite nominally still being a Commonwealth country, Ireland's Taoiseach Eamon De Valera and the ruling Fianna Fail party chose to remain neutral during the Second World War. Although this decision has been called Ireland's second declaration of independence, it outraged Winston Churchill, who saw Ireland's neutrality as not only immoral, but illegal. Although De Valera discreetly bent Irish neutrality in favor of the Western Allies, the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department secretly engaged in multiple unsuccessful intrigues aimed at weakening De Valera's popularity and bringing Ireland into the war.
Despite Ireland's neutrality, the events and atrocities of that war did inspire Irish poetry as well.
In his 1964 poetry collection Lux aeterna, Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, an Irish-language poet from Ballinasloe, County Galway, included a long poem inspired by the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, entitled Aifreann na marbh ("Mass for the Dead"). The poem is an imitation of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, "with the significant omission of 'Credo' and 'Gloria.'"[194]
According to Louis De Paor, "In the course of the poem, the glories of Irish and European civilisation,of art, literature, science, commerce, philosophy, language, and religion are interrogated and found incapable of providing a meaningful response to the apparently unlimited human capacity for destruction. In the month of Lúnasa, the Pagan Celtic God of light, on the Christian feast day of the Transfiguration, Dé Luain (Monday) becomes Lá an Luain (Doomsday), as the destructive light of atomic annihilation replaces the natural light of the sun. The poem also draws on early Irish literature to articulate Ó Tuairisc's idea that the poet has a responsibility to intercede in the eternal struggle between love and violence through the unifying, healing, power of creative imagination. While everyone is culpable in the annihilation of Hiroshima, the poet, the word-priest, bears a particular burden of responsibility."[195]
Scotland
Hamish Henderson a Scottish poet from Blairgowrie, Perthshire,[196] served as an officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps during the North African Campaign. During his service, Henderson collected the lyrics to "D-Day Dodgers," a satirical song to the tune of "Lili Marlene", attributed to Lance-Sergeant Harry Pynn, who had served in Italy. Henderson also wrote the lyrics to The 51st (Highland) Division's Farewell to Sicily, set to a pipe tune called "Farwell to the Creeks". The book in which these were collected, Ballads of World War II, was published "privately" to evade censorship, but still earned Henderson a ten-year ban from BBC radio. Henderson's 1948 poetry book about his experiences in the war, Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, received the Somerset Maugham Award.[196]
Scottish Gaelic poet Duncan Livingstone, a native of the Isle of Mull who had lived in Pretoria, South Africa, since 1903, published several poems in Gaelic about the war. They included an account of the Battle of the River Plate and also an imitation of Sìleas na Ceapaich's early 18th century lament, Alasdair a Gleanna Garadh, in honor of Livingstone's nephew, Pilot Officer Alasdair Ferguson Bruce of the Royal Air Force, who was shot down and killed during a mission over Nazi Germany in 1941.[197]
Scottish Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean was raised in the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which he later described as "the strictest of Calvinist fundamentalism" on the Isle of Raasay. He had become, by the outbreak of World War II, a Communist-sympathiser. MacLean was also a soldier poet who wrote about his combat experiences with the Royal Corps of Signals during the Western Desert campaign. MacLean's time in the firing line ended after he was severely wounded at the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1941.
MacLean's most famous Gaelic war poem is Glac a' Bhàis ("The Valley of Death"), which relates his thoughts on seeing a dead German soldier in North Africa. In the poem, MacLean ponders what role the dead man may have played in Nazi atrocities against both German Jews and members of the Communist Party of Germany. MacLean concludes, however, by saying that whatever the German soldier may or may not have done, he showed no pleasure in his death upon Ruweisat Ridge.
Following the war, MacLean would go on to become a major figure in world literature. He was described by the Scottish Poetry Library as "one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era" because of his "mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics".[198] Northern Irish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Seamus Heaney has credited MacLean with saving Scottish Gaelic poetry.
Upon the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, North Uist war poet Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna composed the poem Òran dhan Dara Chogaidh ("A Song for World War II"). In the poem, Dòmhnall urged the young Scottish Gaels who were going off to fight to not be afraid and that victory over Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany would come by October 1939.[199]
On 16 November 1939, the British merchant ship S.S. Arlington Court was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by the German submarine U-43.[200] In his poem Calum Moireasdan an Arlington Court ("Calum Morrison of the Arlington Court"), Dòmhnall paid tribute to the courage shown by one of the survivors, a seventeen year old Gaelic-speaking merchant seaman from Calbost on the Isle of Lewis. Morrison had been the only survivor in his lifeboat who had known how to sail and had managed to pilot their lifeboat eastwards for five days, until he and his fellow survivors were rescued at the mouth of the English Channel.[201]
Also during the Second World War, Dòmhnall served in the Home Guard, about which he composed the song Òran a' Home Guard ("The Song of the Home Guard"), which pokes fun at an exercise in which a platoon from North Uist was ordered to simulate taking the airfield at Benbecula from the invading Wehrmacht.[202]
At the same time, Dòmhnall's son Calum MacDonald served in the Merchant navy, and regularly sailed within sight of North Uist on his travels between the port of Glasgow and the United States. With this in mind, the Bard composed the poem Am Fianais Uibhist ("In Sight of Uist").[203]
Aonghas Caimbeul (1903–1982), a Scottish Gaelic poet from Swainbost on the Isle of Lewis, had served during the Interwar Period with the Seaforth Highlanders in British India. While there, Caimbeul had heard Mahatma Gandhi speak and had also seen the aviator Amy Johnson. Therefore, upon the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Caimbeul rejoined his old regiment and saw combat against the invading Wehrmacht during the Fall of France. After the 51st (Highland) Division surrendered at Saint-Valery-en-Caux on 12 June 1940, Caimbeul spent the rest of the war in POW camps in Occupied Poland, where he mostly did unpaid agricultural labor.
In his award-winning memoir Suathadh ri Iomadh Rubha,[204] Caimbeul recalled the origins of his poem, Deargadan Phòland ("The Fleas of Poland"), "We called them the Freiceadan Dubh ('Black Watch'), and any man they didn't reduce to cursing and swearing deserved a place in the courts of the saints. I made a satirical poem about them at the time, but that didn't take the strength out of their frames or the sharpness out of their sting."[205]
Caimbeul composed other poems during his captivity, including Smuaintean am Braighdeanas am Pòland, 1944 ("Thoughts on Bondage in Poland, 1944").[204]
After a three-month-long forced march from Thorn to Magdeburg which he graphically describes in his memoirs, Caimbeul was liberated from captivity on 11 April 1945. He returned to his native Swainbost and spent his life there as a shopkeeper until he died at Stornoway on 28 January 1982.[206]
Aonghas Caimbeul's collected poems, Moll is Cruithneachd, were published at Glasgow in 1972 and were favorably reviewed.[204]
Caimbeul's memoirs, Suathadh ri Iomadh Rubha, which won the £200 prize in a contest offered by the Gaelic Books Council, were also published at Glasgow in 1973. Of the memoir, Ronald Black has written, "It is a remarkable achievement consisting as it does of the memoirs of an exciting life, woven together with a forthright personal philosophy and much detailed ethnological commentary on tradition and change in island communities during the twentieth century, all steeped in a solution of anecdote, sometimes brilliantly funny. It is the twentieth century's leading work of Gaelic nonfictional prose."[204]
Calum MacNeacail (1902–1978), a Scottish Gaelic poet from Gedintailor, Isle of Skye, served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. In his 1946 poem Cùmhnantan Sìthe Pharis ("The Paris Peace Treaties"), MacNeacail praised the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and threatened the same fate against Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov if the continued refusing to cooperate with the Western Allies.
South Africa
In South African poetry in English, Roy Campbell wrote several poems in favor of the Allied cause during the Second World War. In one of them, Campbell expressed his elation and pride at seeing the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal returning to Gibraltar following combat against the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
In Afrikaans literature, the main poet of the Second World War is Uys Krige, who travelled as a war correspondent with the South African Army during the North African Campaign.
After being captured at the Battle of Tobruk in 1941, Krige was sent to a POW camp in Fascist Italy. After he escaped two years later, Krige returned to South Africa able to speak fluent Italian.[207] Krige's volume Oorlogsgedigte, or "War poems", was published in 1942.
Wales
Anglo-Welsh poet Alun Lewis, who was born at Cwmaman, near Aberdare in the Cynon Valley of the South Wales Coalfield, remains one if the most well-known English-language poets of the Second World War.
After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Lewis first joined the British Army Royal Engineers as an enlisted man because he was a pacifist, but still wished to aid the war effort. However, he then inexplicably sought and gained an officer's commission in an infantry battalion. In 1941 he collaborated with artists John Petts and Brenda Chamberlain on the "Caseg broadsheets". His first published book was the collection poetry Raider's Dawn and other poems (1942), which was followed up by a volume of short stories, The Last Inspection (1942). In 1942 he was sent to British India with the South Wales Borderers.
Lewis' poems about his war experiences have been described as showing "his brooding over his army experiences and trying to catch and hold some vision that would illuminate its desolation with meaning" (see Ian Hamilton "Alun Lewis Selected Poetry and Prose)[208]
Lewis died on 5 March 1944 in Burma, during the campaign against the Imperial Japanese Army. He was found shot in the head, after shaving and washing, near the officers' latrines, and with his revolver in his hand.
Alun Lewis died from his wound six hours later. A British Army court of inquiry later concluded that Lewis had tripped and that the shooting was an accident.[209]
Anglo-Welsh poet Dylan Thomas also wrote about the victims of Luftwaffe bombs during the Battle of Britain and about The Holocaust in his poem A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.
United States
The mass slaughter and futility of World War I were so deeply ingrained upon the American people, that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to bring the United States into the war against Nazi Germany were very unpopular.
The America First Committee, of which Charles Lindbergh was the spokesman, and the Communist Party of the United States of America were both organizing protests against Roosevelt's foreign policies. Opposition to American involvement in the war vanished completely, after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.
Although the Second World War is not usually thought of as a poet's war, there were American war poets.
In an interview for the documentary The Muse of Fire, U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur commented that there was a great difference between the war poets of World War I and those, like himself, who wrote and served during World War II. Wilbur explained that, unlike Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, American World War II poets believed themselves to be fighting a just war and that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan were terrible enemies which needed to be confronted and destroyed. He did add that many World War II poets, including himself, felt sympathy for the plight of conscientious objectors.
After being thrown out of signals training and busted back to the ranks for expressing sympathy for the Communist Party of the United States of America, Richard Wilbur was shipped overseas as an enlisted man and served in the European theatre as a radio operator with the 36th U.S. Infantry Division. He was in combat during the Italian Campaign at the Battle of Anzio, the Battle of Cassino, and in the Liberation of Rome. He was ultimately promoted to the ranks of sergeant.
Sergeant Wilbur's war continued through the Allied Landings in Southern France and in the final invasion of Nazi Germany. During his war service and over the decades that followed, Richard Wilbur wrote many war poems.
One of Wilbur's best-known war poems is Tywater, about the combat death of Corporal Lloyd Tywater, a former Texas rodeo cowboy with a talent for rope tricks, knife throwing, and shooting swallows out of the sky with a pistol.
Another famous war poem by Richard Wilbur is First Snow in Alsace, which lyrically describes the horrors of a recent battlefield in Occupied France being covered up by the beautiful sight of new-fallen snow.
Anthony Hecht, an American poet of German Jewish ancestry, served in the European Theater as a G.I. with the 97th U.S. Infantry Division. Hecht not only saw combat in the Ruhr pocket and in Occupied Czechoslovakia, but also helped liberate Flossenbürg concentration camp. After the liberation, Hecht interviewed survivors to gather evidence about German war crimes. Decades later, Hecht sought treatment for PTSD and used his war experiences as the subject of many of his poems.
American poet Dunstan Thompson, a native of New London, Connecticut began publishing his poems while serving as a soldier in the European Theater during World War II. Thompson's poems depict military service through the eyes of a homosexual, who is engaged in casual encounters with soldiers and sailors in Blitzed London.[210]
Karl Shapiro, a stylish writer with a commendable regard for his craft,[211] wrote poetry in the Pacific Theater while he served there during World War II. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems, written while Shapiro was stationed in New Guinea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945, while Shapiro was still in the military. Shapiro was American Poet Laureate in 1946 and 1947. (At the time this title was consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, which was changed by Congress in 1985 to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.).
Also, while serving in the U.S. Army, the American poet Randall Jarrell published his second book of poems, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) based on his wartime experiences. The book includes one of Jarrell's best-known war poems, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." In his follow-up book, Losses (1948), he also focused on the war. The poet Robert Lowell stated publicly that he thought Jarrell had written "the best poetry in English about the Second World War."[212]
Romania
The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan wrote war poetry including "Todesfuge" (translated into English as "Death Fugue",[213] and "Fugue of Death",[214]) a German poem written by probably around 1945 and first published in 1948. It is "among Celan's most well-known and often-anthologized poems".[215] The is regarded as a "masterful description of horror and death in a concentration camp".[216] Celan was born to a Jewish family in Cernauti, Romania; his parents were murdered during the Holocaust, and Celan himself was a prisoner for a time in a concentration camp.
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist, and performance artist, best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French war crimes in the Algerian War.
Japan
Ryuichi Tamura (1923–98) who served in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II is a major Japanese war poet. Following the war, he "helped begin a poetry magazine, The Waste Land" and those poets who contributed to it were "the Waste Land Poets." The work of these writers was especially influenced by T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, C. Day-Lewis and W. H. Auden. Tamura's first book of poems, Four Thousand Days and Nights was published in 1956.[217]
Sadako Kurihara was living in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and it was then "that her life was transformed from being a shopkeeper to becoming one of Japan's most controversial poets. Her first major collection of poems, Black Eggs, published in 1946", but it was heavily censored by the American Occupation Forces Censor, because of how she dealt with the horrors following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. Kurihara has also "taken a stand on" the many Japanese war crimes that were committed during the occupation of China, "the mistreatment of Koreans in Japan, and the need for a world-wide ban on nuclear weapons".[217]
General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the overall commander of the Japanese forces during the Battle of Iwo Jima, was a poet and former diplomat who had been assigned to Washington, D.C., during the Interwar Period. Having seen America's military and industrial power first hand, Kuribayashi opposed Prime Minister Hideki Tojo's decision to attack Pearl Harbor, saying, "The United States is the last country in the world Japan should fight." It was ultimately decided to assign Kuribayashi to the suicide mission of defending Iwo Jima to silence his criticisms of the war.
On 17 March 1945, the General sent his farewell message to Imperial Headquarters accompanied by three traditional death poems in waka form. Both were, according to historian Kumiko Kakehashi, "a subtle protest against the military command that so casually sent men out to die."[218]
Unable to complete this heavy task for our country
Arrows and bullets all spent, so sad we fall.
But unless I smite the enemy,
My body cannot rot in the field.
Yea, I shall be born again seven times
And grasp the sword in my hand.
When ugly weeds cover this island,
My sole thought shall be the Imperial Land.[219]
The poems and the message were heavily rewritten by Japanese military censors before being published and all anti-war sentiments were removed. Instead of describing the General and his soldiers as feeling "sad" to fall in battle, Japanese censors rewrote the poem to say that they died in Banzai charges, which the General had forbidden on Iwo Jima as an unnecessary waste of his men's lives. The uncensored text of both the message and the poems were only published after the Surrender of Japan.
Guerras posteriores
Korean War
The Korean War inspired the war poetry of Rolando Hinojosa, a Mexican-American poet from Mercedes, Texas, and of William Wantling,[220] a Beat poet who is now known to have lied about the fact that he never actually served in combat. (See Stolen Valor).
On 28 March 1956, when BBC Scotland played a recording of a Scottish Gaelic language ceilidh by the soldiers of the King's Own Cameron Highlanders during the Korean War, Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna, who has served in the same regiment during World War I, was listening. He later composed the poem Gillean Chorea ("The Lads in Korea"), in which he declared that the recording had brought back his youth.[221]
Cold War
On 1 November 1952, the United States successfully detonated "Ivy Mike", the first hydrogen bomb, on the island of Elugelab in Enewetak Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Ivy. On 22 November 1955, the Soviet Union followed suit with the successful testing of RDS-37, which had been developed by Andrei Sakharov, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Yakov Zel'dovich, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeastern Kazakhstan.
In his poem Òran an H-Bomb ("The Song of the H-Bomb"), North Uist poet Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna commented on how, after an attack against German trenches during World War I, the stretcher-bearers would come by sunset to pick up the wounded. But now, due to weapons like the hydrogen bomb, he continued, nothing would be spared, neither man nor beast, neither the beaches nor the mountaintops. Only one or two such bombs would suffice, he said, to completely wipe out the islands where Gaelic is spoken and everyone and everything in them. But Dòmhnall urged his listeners to trust that Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross out of love for the human race, would never permit such a terrible destruction to fall on those whose sins he redeemed through his blood and the wounds in his hands and his side.[222]
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War also produced war poets, including Armenian-American poet Michael Casey whose début collection, Obscenities, drew on his service with the Military Police Corps in the Quảng Ngãi Province of South Vietnam. The book won the 1972 Yale Younger Poets Award.
W. D. Ehrhart, a United States Marine Corps Sergeant who won the Purple Heart in the Battle of Huế during the Tet Offensive, has since been dubbed "the Dean of Vietnam War poetry."
At the height of the Vietnam War in 1967, American poet Richard Wilbur composed A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson on His Refusal of Peter Hurd's Official Portrait. In a clear cut case of "criticism from the Right", Wilbur compares U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson with Thomas Jefferson and finds the former to be greatly wanting. Commenting that Jefferson "would have wept to see small nations dread/ The imposition of our cattle brand," and that in Jefferson's term, "no army's blood was shed", Wilbur urges President Johnson to seriously consider how history will judge him and his Administration.
Rob Jacques, a Vietnam-Era United States Navy veteran, has explored the tension between love and violence in war from the perspective of homosexual servicemen in his collection, War Poet, published by Sibling Rivalry Press.[223]
Yusef Komunyakaa, an African-American poet from Bogalusa, Louisiana, served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and has since used his experiences as the source of his poetry. Komunyakaa has said that following his return to the United States, he found the American people's rejection of Vietnam veterans to be every bit as painful as the racism he had experienced while growing up the American South before the Civil Rights Movement.
Another poet of the Vietnam War is Bruce Weigl.[224]
Caitlín Maude, an Irish-language poet, actress, and sean-nós singer from Casla in the Connemara Gaeltacht, composed the poem Amhrán grá Vietnam ("Vietnamese Love Song"), which tells a story of love and hope amidst the fighting and the destruction caused by both sides.
War on Terror
Most recently, the Iraq War has produced war poets including Brian Turner whose début collection, Here, Bullet, is based on his experience as an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from November 2003 until November 2004 in Iraq. The book won numerous awards including the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the 2006 Maine Literary Award in Poetry, and the 2006 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.[225][226] The book also was an Editor's Choice in The New York Times and received significant attention from the press including reviews and notices on NPR and in The New Yorker, The Global and Mail, and the Library Journal. In The New Yorker, Dana Goodyear wrote that, "As a war poet, [Brian Turner] sidesteps the classic distinction between romance and irony, opting instead for the surreal."[227]
En la cultura popular
Music
- The 1876 opera Nikola Šubić Zrinski by Croatian composer Ivan Zajc, is based on Brne Karnarutić's epic poem Vazetje Sigeta grada, about the Battle of Szigetvár.
- The 1887 opera Prince Igor, by Russian composer Alexander Borodin, is based on the The Tale of Igor's Campaign (Слово о пълкѹ Игоревѣ).
- English composer Benjamin Britten incorporated eight of Wilfred Owen's war poems into War Requiem, along with words from the Tridentine Requiem Mass (Missa pro Defunctis). War Requiem was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral and was first performed there on 30 May 1962.
- In the 2008 album Dual, a collaboration between Irish and Scottish folk musicians Éamonn Doorley, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, Ross Martin, and Julie Fowlis, Fowlis recorded An Eala Bhàn, an iconic Scottish Gaelic love song by World War I poet Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna. In her 2009 album Uam, Scottish folk singer Fowlis recorded Breton World War I poet Yann-Ber Kalloc'h's most famous song, Me 'zo Ganet kreiz ar e mor ("I was Born in the Middle of the Sea"). The lyrics were first translated from the original Breton language into Fowlis' native Scottish Gaelic. On the 2018 album Allt, Fowlis performs Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna's war poem, Air an Somme ("The Song of the Somme") with Éamonn Doorley, Zoë Conway and John McIntyre.
- In 2012, New Zealander and Classical composer Richard Oswin set to music Australian war poet Leon Gellert's poem The Last to Leave as part of Three Gallipoli Settings, a choral work commissioned by the New Zealand Secondary Students' Choir.
- American composer Patrick Zimmerli's oratorio Alan Seeger: Instrument of Destiny, which combines European opera and American jazz music, sets to music the poems, letters, and diary entries of American war poet Alan Seeger. The oratorio was first performed in 2017 at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City.
In film
- In the 1940 film The Fighting 69th, which tells the story of the Irish-American Doughboys from New York City who served in the regiment of the same name during World War I, American war poet Joyce Kilmer (Jeffrey Lynn) appears onscreen. The live burial of 21 American Doughboys by a German artillery barrage in the Rouge-Bouquet forest, about which Kilmer wrote his most famous war poem, is also shown onscreen.
- At the beginning of the 1990 film Memphis Belle, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, Sgt. Daniel Daly (Eric Stoltz), a proudly Irish-American radio operator in the United States Army Air Force during World War II, recites William Butler Yeats' An Irish Airman Foresees His Death to his fellow crewmembers of a B-17 Flying Fortress.[228]
- The 1992 Welsh language anti-war biographical film Hedd Wyn depicts war poet Ellis Humphrey Evans (Huw Garmon) as a tragic hero, with an intense dislike of the jingoism, ultranationalism, militarism, Anglophilia, and Germanophobia that surrounds him. The film also focuses on Evans' pursuit of his lifelong dream of winning the Bardic Chair at the National Eisteddfod of Wales and on his three-year-long battle against overwhelming pressure to, "join up," during the First World War. The film's emotional impact is increased when the real Hedd Wyn's love poetry and war poetry are read in voiceover at key moments of the film. Hedd Wyn won the Royal Television Society's Television Award for Best Single Drama. It also became the first British motion picture to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.[229]
- The 1995 film Braveheart, about the life and death of iconic Scottish nationalist leader Sir William Wallace, was according to its screenwriter, Randall Wallace, based heavily upon Blind Harry's 15th century epic poem The Wallace. Several allusions to poems by Robert Burns about the Scottish Wars of Independence also appear in the film.
- In the 1995 drama film Mr. Holland's Opus, directed by Stephen Herek, high school gym teacher and football coach Bill Meister (Jay Thomas) reads Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae's In Flanders' Fields aloud during the military funeral of Lou Russ (Terrence Howard), a former student who has been killed serving in the United States Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.
- The 1997 film Regeneration focuses on the institutionalisation of English war poet Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby) and Anglo-Welsh war poet Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce) at Craiglockart War Hospital in Edinburgh during World War I. The film particularly focuses on the character arc of Lt. Sassoon, who, following his open letter demanding a negotiated peace in The Times, has been declared insane and remains confined to the hospital until he volunteers to return to active service on the Western Front.
- The 2014 film Testament of Youth tells the story of star-crossed lovers and war poets Vera Brittain (Alicia Vikander) and Roland Leighton (Kit Harrington). As in Hedd Wyn, Roland Leighton is depicted as a tragic hero and his love poetry and war poetry are recited in voiceover at key moments of the film.
- The 2017 stage play Death Comes for the War Poets, by Joseph Pearce, weaves, "a verse tapestry," about the military and spiritual journeys of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.[230]
- The 2019 biographical film Tolkien focuses on the early life of fantasy novelist and poet J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult), his service in the British Army during World War I, and his close friendship with fellow war poet Geoffrey Bache Smith (Anthony Boyle). Shortly after Tolkien learns of Smith's death at the Battle of the Somme, the real Geoffrey Smith's last letter to Tolkien is read aloud in voiceover. The film then shows how Tolkien edited his fallen friend's poetry for publication and wrote the foreword himself.
In television
- In the 1984 Peanuts television special What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae's In Flanders' Fields is read aloud at a World War I cemetery in France by Linus van Pelt (Jeremy Schoenberg).
- The 1989 BBC sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth, which is set in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I, repeatedly lampoons the absurdity of, "the mud, the death, the endless poetry", and particularly takes swipes at the romantic idealism found in the war poems of Rupert Brooke.
Ver también
- Epic poetry
- War novel
Referencias
- ^ "war poet noun" The Oxford Dictionary of English (revised edition). Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2005
- ^ Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Le monde d'Homère (The World of Homer), Perrin (2000), p. 19
- ^ Maciver, Calum (2012). Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica: Engaging Homer in Late Antiquity. Brill. pp. 17–18.
- ^ Maciver, Calum (2012). Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica: Engaging Homer in Late Antiquity. Brill.
- ^ a b Boyce, Mary (1987), "Ayādgār ī Zarērān", Encyclopedia Iranica, vol. 3, New York: Routledge, pp. 128–129
- ^ Boyce, Mary (1983), "Parthian Writings and Literature", in Yarshatar, Ehsan (ed.), The Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanian Periods, Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 3(2), Cambridge University Press, pp. 1151–1165, ISBN 0-521-24693-8.
- ^ Boyce, Mary (1957), "The Parthian Gōsān and Iranian Minstrel Tradition", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 89 (1/2): 10–45, doi:10.1017/S0035869X0010735X.
- ^ "HUMATA HŪXTA HUVARŠTA". Encyclopaedia Iranica. Retrieved 13 July 2019.
- ^ Anklesaria, Behramgore Tahmuras (1918), "Introduction to the Ayîbâtkâr-î Zarîrân", in Jamasp-Asana, Jamaspji Minocheherji, trans. (ed.), The Pahlavi Texts of the MK Codex, (Pahlavi Texts, vol. II), Bombay: K. J. Jamasp-Asana, pp. 14–16.
- ^ Hamid Dabashi (2012). The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674067592.
- ^ Jones, Emrys Wynn. "Jones, Thomas Gwynn". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37616. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ Edwards (2016), The Eisteddfod, pages 50–51.
- ^ Thomas, M. Wynn (2016). The Nations of Wales: 1890–1914. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. p. 190. ISBN 9781783168385. Retrieved 2 February 2021.
- ^ Hunter 2007, p. 119.
- ^ Davies 1970, pp. 8–9.
- ^ Toumanian, Hovhannes. David of Sassoun (Armenian and English version ed.). Oshagan Publishers. pp. 7–8.
- ^ Leon Surmelian (1964), Daredevils of Sassoun: The Armenian National Epic, pages 13–14.
- ^ Leon Surmelian (1964), Daredevils of Sassoun: The Armenian National Epic, page 14.
- ^ James Henthorn Todd (1867), Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh – The War of the Gaedhil with the Danes and Other Norsemen, p. cix.
- ^ Lambeth Palace, MS Carew 596
- ^ Terras 1985, p. 425.
- ^ V. V. Medvedev (1986). Сцена солнечного затмения в "Слове о полку Игореве" [Scene of the Solar Eclipse in the "Lay of the Host of Igor"] (in Russian). feb-web.ru. Retrieved 30 March 2015.
- ^ Ushinskiĭ 1978, p. 543.
- ^ "The examination of the text of The Lay of Igor's Host". History of Russian Literature. WordPress Theme by WPZOOM. 2015. Retrieved 30 March 2015.
- ^ Nabokov 2009, p. 71.
- ^ Serge Zenkovsky (1974), Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, Meridian Books. pp. 161–190.
- ^ C.H. Andrushyshen and Watson Kirkconnell (1963), The Ukrainian Poets: 1189–1962, Published for the Ukrainian Canadian Committee by University of Toronto. pp. 3–21.
- ^ "The Bard of Wales" in the Hungarian Electronic Library Retrieved 11 August 2019.
- ^ The Bards of Wales, translated by Watson Kirkconnel
- ^ Crump, Eryl (7 August 2012). "Strengthening the link between Wales and Hungary". WalesOnline. Retrieved 7 August 2012.
- ^ Edwards (2016), The Eisteddfod, pages 51–53.
- ^ Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers, Item 548456. Retrieved 1 December 2009.
- ^ Sirotković, Jakov; Cecić, Ivo; zavod, Jugoslavenski leksikografski (7 February 1990). Enciklopedija Jugoslavije. Jugoslavenski leksikografski zavod. ISBN 9788670530249 – via Google Books.
- ^ Karnarutić, Brne (1866). Vazetje Sigeta grada (in Croatian). Zagreb: Narodna tiskarnica. pp. 1–83.
- ^ Lökös, István (April 1997). "Prilozi madžarskoj recepciji Marulićevih djela" [A Contribution to the Hungarian Reception of Marulić’s Works]. Colloquia Maruliana (in Croatian). 6. Retrieved 3 December 2009.
- ^ "Miklós Zrínyi". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 28 September 2016.
- ^ Bratulić, Josip (2016). "Adrijanskoga mora Sirena & Obsida sigecka" (in Croatian). Zagreb: Matica hrvatska. Retrieved 27 May 2019.
- ^ Campbell (1971), Highland Songs of the Forty-Five, p. 35, footnote No. 3.
- ^ Mackenzie, John (1909). Sar-obair nam bard Gaelach : the beauties of Gaelic poetry and lives of the Highland bards. Edinburgh: John Grant. pp. 373–4.
- ^ Ewan, Elizabeth; Innes, Sue; Reynolds, Sian, eds. (2006). The biographical dictionary of Scottish women : from the earliest times to 2004 (Reprinted. ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. p. 69. ISBN 0748617132.
- ^ John Stuart Blackie (1889). Scottish Song... W. Blackwood & sons. pp. 234–238. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
- ^ Maclean, Malcolm, ed. (2002). Great Book of Gaelic. Canongate U.S. p. 276. ISBN 9781841952505. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
- ^ Masson, David (1885). Macmillan's Magazine Volume 52. Macmillan and Company. pp. 309–310. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
- ^ Koch, John T., ed. (2006). Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 1033. ISBN 9781851094400. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
- ^ Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse, p. 787.
- ^ Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th century Scottish Gaelic Verse, pp. 757–759.
- ^ Theo van Heijnsbergen and Carla Sassi, Within and Without Empire: Scotland Across the (Post)colonial Borderline, p. 75.
- ^ Edited by Natasha Sumner and Aidan Doyle (2020), North American Gaels: Speech, Song, and Story in the Diaspora, McGill-Queen's University Press. Page 14.
- ^ Edited by Michael Newton (2015), Seanchaidh na Coille: Memory-Keeper of the Forest, Cape Breton University Press. Page 517.
- ^ Edited by Michael Newton (2015), Seanchaidh na Coille: Memory-Keeper of the Forest, Cape Breton University Press. Pages 52–59.
- ^ a b c Merry, Bruce (2004). Encyclopedia of modern Greek literature. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-313-30813-0.
- ^ Fleming, Katherine Elizabeth (1999). The Muslim Bonaparte: diplomacy and orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece. Princeton University Press. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-691-00194-4.
Ali's use of Greek for courtly business... The population of Ali's territories was predominantly Greek..."
- ^ Clayer 2014.
- ^ Herwegh, Georg, The Columbia Encyclopedia (2008)
- ^ The Times, Southern Germany, 29 September 1848
- ^ Reg Gadney (1986), Cry Hungary! Uprising 1956, pp. 28–30.
- ^ Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson and annotated by Alfred Lord Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1908), II, 369.
- ^ Brighton, Terry (2005), Hell Riders: The True Story of the Charge of the Light Brigade, Penguin
- ^ Callow, 283
- ^ Callow, 293
- ^ A German Poem About the First Minnesota
- ^ Edited by Revs. Thos. E. Hughes and David Edwards, and Messes. Hugh G. Roberts and Thomas Hughes (1895), History of the Welsh in Minnesota, Foreston, and Lime Springs, Ia., page 273.
- ^ Carrington, C. E., (1955) The life of Rudyard Kipling, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY, p. 236
- ^ Craig Raine (ed.), Kipling, Selected Poetry (Penguin, 1992), pp. 214–215
- ^ Poetry of the Boer War, St Andrew's University
- ^ Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (London: Macmillan, 1909)
- ^ Marq De Villiers (1988), White Tribe Dreaming: Apartheid's Bitter Roots as Witnessed by Eight Generations of an Afrikaner Family, p. 232.
- ^ a b Dana Gioia, John Allan Wyeth: Soldier Poet, St Austin Review, March/April 2020. p. 4.
- ^ Luković, Suzana. "VELIKI SRPSKI PESNICI U VELIKOM RATU Prešao je preko Albanije, radio kao srpski obaveštajac i ovekovečio sahrane srpskih mladića u BESMRTNOJ PESMI". Blic.rs (in Serbian). Retrieved 25 July 2019.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 348.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, pp. 348–349.
- ^ a b Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 349.
- ^ a b Erika Papp Faber (2012), A Sampler of Hungarian Poetry, Romanika Kiadó, Budapest. p. 120.
- ^ Erika Papp Faber (2012), A Sampler of Hungarian Poetry, Romanika Kiadó, Budapest. pp. 120–121.
- ^ Gyóni Géza: Magyar bárd sorsa
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, pp. 349–350.
- ^ Erika Papp Faber (2012), A Sampler of Hungarian Poetry, Romanika Kiadó, Budapest. pp. 124–125.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 118.
- ^ Franz Janowitz at warpoets.org
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 109.
- ^ Modris Eksteins (2000), Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, pp. 55–64.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 124.
- ^ a b c Patrick Bridgwater (1985), The German Poets of the First World War, Croom Helm Ltd. p. 41.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 127.
- ^ Patrick Bridgwater (1985), The German Poets of the First World War, Croom Helm Ltd. p. 42.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 81.
- ^ Tim Cross (1989) The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets, and Playwrights, p. 186.
- ^ Walter Flex. Gesammelte Werke (Title Translation: Collected Works), Vol. 1, pp. 73–74, quote in p. 74.
Lars Koch. Der Erste Weltkrieg als Medium der Gegenmoderne: Zu den Werken von Walter Flex und Ernst Jünger. (Title Translation: "The First World War as a Means of Counter-Modernity: To the Works of Walter Flex and Ernst Jünger.") Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, p. 117 and p. 117 n. 544. ISBN 3-8260-3168-7 - ^ Fritz Gause. Königsberg in Preußen. (Gräfe und Unzer, 1968), p. 226.
- ^ a b Patrick Bridgwater (1985), The German Poets of the First World War, p. 96.
- ^ Patrick Bridgwater (1985), The German Poets of the First World War, p. 100.
- ^ a b Patrick Bridgwater (1985), The German Poets of the First World War, p. 97.
- ^ a b c d Tim Cross (1989), The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets, and Playwrights, p. 304.
- ^ a b Tim Cross (1988), p. 270.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), p. 271.
- ^ R.R. Milner-Gulland in A.K. Thorlby (ed.), The Penguin Companion to Literature: European (Penguin, 1969), p. 762.
- ^ [1]
- ^ Graves, Dianne (1997). A Crown of Life: The World of John McCrae. Spellmount. pp. 154–171. ISBN 1873376863. OCLC 39342779..
- ^ a b Bonfire – The Chestnut Gentleman by Susan Raby-Dunne, 2012
- ^ "Casualty Details Helmer, Alexis Hannum". Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
- ^ Prescott, p. 99
- ^ Holt, pp. 54–62
- ^ CWGC: John McCrae
- ^ a b Busch, p. 75; Holt, p. 62. Prescott, p. 129.
- ^ Busch, p. 75.
- ^ "Robert W. Service 1914–1918 Great War Medals".
- ^ "Extended [Biography]," RobertWService.com, 21 July 2003, 3. Web, 4 April 2011
- ^ Archibald MacMechan, Headwaters of Canadian Literature (Toronto: New Canadian Library, 1974), 219–221.
- ^ a b Axelrod, Jeremy. "Thomas Hardy". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
- ^ Katherine Kearney Maynard, Thomas Hardy's Tragic Poetry: The Lyrics and The Dynasts. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991, pp. 8–12.
- ^ Gilmour, David, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
- ^ Richard Perceval Graves, ‘Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895–1985)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
- ^ The Georgian Revolt, p. 166.
- ^ Dilworth, Thomas. Reading David Jones. Cardiff: University of W Wales, 2008, p. 1; Dilworth, Thomas. The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988; Eliot, T.S. "A note of introduction," In Parenthesis. By David Jones. London: Faber, 1961, vii.
- ^ Westminster Abbey: Poets of the First World War
- ^ a b c Eire's WWI War Poet: F.E. Ledwidge by Miriam O'Gara Kilmurry M.A., Publisher: Amazon (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; Lrg edition 23 February 2016), ISBN 978-1523482979.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), p. 42.
- ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, p. 41.
- ^ Walking Like A Queen – Irish Impressions By G. K. Chesterton (2008 Tradibooks edition, France) p90.
- ^ Jim Haughey, The First World War in Irish Poetry, Bucknell University Press, 2002, p. 102
- ^ Alice Curtayne (1998), Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet, p. 10.
- ^ Alice Curtayne (1998), Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet, p. 188.
- ^ E. Longley, "Ledwidge, Francis Edward (1887–1917)" : Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, (2004), vol. 33, pp. 45–46.
- ^ Jeffares, Alexander Norman.A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Stanford University Press (1968) p. 189
- ^ Yeats, William Butler. qtd. in A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeatsby Norman Alexander Jeffares. Stanford University Press (1968) p. 189
- ^ Haughey, Jim. The First World War in Irish Poetry Bucknell University Press (2002) p. 162
- ^ Yeats' poem "Reprisals", referred to below, says 19, but this number is not consistent with other sources. See, for example, Cross & Cockade (GB) (1973) Vol. 4 No. 4 and (1974) Vol. 5 No. 1
- ^ Obituary
- ^ Ray Burke, "Challenge to official accounts of Gregory death in WWI," 2 January 2018, RTÉ News Now, https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2018/0101/930446-robert-gregory/
- ^ Foster 2001 pp. 68–69
- ^ Haughey, Jim (2002). The First World War in Irish Poetry. Bucknell University Press. p. 161. ISBN 9781611481518.
- ^ Deane, Seamus (1998). "Boredom and Apocalypse". Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Clarendon lectures in English literature. Clarendon Press. p. 179. ISBN 9780198184904.
- ^ Albright, Daniel. "Quantum Poetics: Yeats's figures as reflections in Water", Cambridge University Press (1997), p. 35.
- ^ Robert Douglas Pinkerton (1918), Ladies from Hell, New York: The Century Co., p. 76, OCLC 1907457,
It was perhaps seven or eight hundred yards from our trenches to the German line, nearly half a mile, and over this space went the Ladies from Hell, as the Germans call the Scottishers.
- ^ Riguidel, Lt., Donna (7 July 2010). Queens' Own Camerons History Made With History Book Presentation. National Defence and the Canadian Forces. Department of National Defence (Canada).
"Ladies from Hell" was a nickname given to kilted regiments during the First World War, by the Germans that faced them in the trenches (Die Damen aus der Hölle).
- ^ Clive Cussler (1996),The Sea Hunters: True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks, pp. 274–275.
- ^ Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse, Polygon. pp. 748–749.
- ^ a b Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse, Polygon. pp. xxiv.
- ^ Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse, Polygon. pp. 747–748.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), p. xvi.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna (1995), pp. 174–177.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), p. xxxv.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), pp. 88–91.
- ^ Alan Llwyd (2008), Out of the Fire of Hell; Welsh Experience of the Great War 1914–1918 in Prose and Verse, pp. xv–xxiv.
- ^ Shipton, Martin (30 December 2014). "The First World War, pacifism, and the cracks in Wales' Nonconformism movement". Wales Online. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
- ^ Ivanic, Roz; Edwards, Richard; Barton, David; Martin-Jones, Marilyn; Fowler, Zoe; Hughes, Buddug; Mannion, Greg; Miller, Kate; Satchwell, Candice; Smith, June (4 March 2009). Improving Learning in College: Rethinking Literacies Across the Curriculum. ISBN 9781134031474. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
- ^ Alan Llwyd, Out of the Fire of Hell: Welsh Experience of the Great War 1914–1918 in Prose and Verse, Gomer Press, 2008.
- ^ "Flanders community remembers Welsh dead in 'dark days' of World War I". BBC NEWS. 13 February 2013.
- ^ "Casualty details—Evans, Ellis Humphrey". Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Retrieved 1 March 2010.
- ^ Alan Llwyd, Out of the Fire of Hell; Welsh Experience of the Great War 1914–1918 in Prose and Verse, Gomer Press, 2008. p. 314.
- ^ "The Great War: Part 1 – Transcript". American Experience. PBS. 3 July 2018. Retrieved 7 May 2019.
- ^ Friedman, Dick (5 October 2016). "Alan Seeger". Harvard Magazine. Retrieved 18 September 2019.
- ^ Ripper, Jason (18 February 2015). American Stories: Living American History: v. 2: From 1865. Routledge. ISBN 9781317477051.
- ^ Seeger, Alan (1917). Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 214-215, 218.
alan seeger.
- ^ Seeger, Alan. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Columbia Point, Boston, MA. Web. Retrieved 28 January 2014.
- ^ a b Hillis, John. Joyce Kilmer: A Bio-Bibliography. Master of Science (Library Science) Thesis. Catholic University of America. (Washington, DC: 1962)
- ^ Letter from Joyce Kilmer to Aline Kilmer, 24 November 1917 in Kilmer, Joyce with Holliday, Robert Cortes (editor). Poems, Essays and Letters in Two Volumes. (1918).
- ^ World War I Diary of Joseph J. Jones Sr., published at website "One Jones Family" by Joseph J. Jones III. Retrieved 27 December 2006.
- ^ The History of the Fighting 69th: Rouge Bouquet Archived 29 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine (no further authorship information given). Retrieved 27 December 2006.
- ^ Duffy, Francis Patrick (1919). Father Duffy's Story. New York: George H. Doran Company.
- ^ " Joyce Kilmer Slain on the West Front; Former Member of Times Staff Had Won Sergeantcy In The 165th of Infantry. His Writings Well Known Author Was Rutgers And Columbia Graduate—Several Veterans Of The 69th Killed. His Lusitania Poem. Fought At The Marne. Veteran Of 69th Killed. Lieut. Harwood 'Doing Fine.' Parents Receive Letter Written After Date Of Reported Death." The New York Times 18 August 1918.
- ^ "Joyce Kilmer cited for French War Cross" The New York Times 2 January 1919.
- ^ American Battle Monuments Commission
- ^ "Mass for Joyce Kilmer. Memorial Service at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York Tomorrow Morning." The New York Times. 13 October 1918.
- ^ Omanson (2019), p. 109.
- ^ B.J. Omanson (2019), Before the Clangor of the Gun: The First World War Poetry of John Allan Wyeth, Monongahela Press, Morgantown, West Virginia. pp. 37–38.
- ^ B.J. Omanson (2019), Before the Clangor of the Gun: The First World War Poetry of John Allan Wyeth, Monongahela Press, Morgantown, West Virginia. pp. 38–39.
- ^ Medal of Honor Recipients, 1863–2013. I, 1863–1978. U.S. Government Printing Office. 14 February 1979. p. 432.(subscription required)
- ^ "World War I Medal of Honor Recipients". history.army.mil. Retrieved 18 March 2015.
- ^ Omanson (2019), pp. 36–49.
- ^ Omanson (2019), p. 39.
- ^ Omanson (2019) Before the Clangor of the Gun, pp. 7–13.
- ^ Wyeth (2008), p. 49.
- ^ Dana Gioia, John Allan Wyeth: Soldier Poet, St Austin Review, March/April 2020. p. 5.
- ^ Moina Michael, Digital Library of Georgia, retrieved 8 February 2012
- ^ Rahman, Rema (9 November 2011), "Who, What, Why: Which countries wear poppies?", BBC News, retrieved 8 February 2012
- ^ The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, edited by Valentine Cunningham (Penguin, 1980); see also War Poets Association: Spanish War
- ^ Poems from Spain: British and Irish International Brigaders of the Spanish Civil War in Verse, edited by Jim Jump. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006)
- ^ Joseph Pearce (2001), Roy Campbell: Selected Poems, Saint Austin Press, pp. 48–50.
- ^ A Líster, jefe en los ejércitos del Ebro, Antonio Machado, June 1938.
- ^ a b Tarn (1975) p. 16
- ^ Czesław Miłosz (1983), The Witness of Poetry, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press. p. 79.
- ^ Czesław Miłosz (1983), The Witness of Poetry, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press. pp. 84–85.
- ^ Czesław Miłosz (1983), The Witness of Poetry, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press. pp. 86–87.
- ^ William Baer (2016), Thirteen on Form: Conversations with Poets, pp. 200–201.
- ^ En record de Primo Levi. Per ricordare Primo Levi (Num. 19 ed.). Quaderns d'Italià. 2014. Retrieved 27 April 2020.
- ^ Martin (2007) p. 10
- ^ Davies, Norman (1982) God's Playground. A History of Poland, Columbia University Press, Vol. II, ISBN 0-231-12819-3
- ^ Proffer, Carl R. (7 August 1977). "Russia in Prussia". The New York Times. Retrieved 18 June 2017.
- ^ "Krvava bajka – Serbo-Croatian Poetry Translation". sites.google.com. Retrieved 25 July 2019.
- ^ a b Blythe, Ronald (1966). Components of the Scene. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
- ^ London Review Archived 22 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine; Andrew Sinclair, The War Decade: An Anthology Of The 1940s. London; Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0241125677 (p. 47)
- ^ Press, John (1 March 1994). "Poets of World War II". In Scott-Kilvert, Ian (ed.). British Writers: 007. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 422–423. ISBN 978-0684166384. Retrieved 25 May 2015.
- ^ Louis De Paor (2016), Leabhar na hAthgabhála: Poems of Repossession: Irish-English Bilingual Edition. p. 164.
- ^ Louis De Paor (2016), Leabhar na hAthgabhála: Poems of Repossession: Irish-English Bilingual Edition. pp. 164–165.
- ^ a b "Dr Hamish Henderson". The Scotsman. 10 March 2002. Retrieved 23 April 2021.
- ^ Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse, p. 727.
- ^ "Sorley MacLean". Scottish Poetry Library. Archived from the original on 17 August 2018. Retrieved 17 August 2018.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), pp. 100–101.
- ^ S.S. Arlington Court
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), pp. 106–109.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), pp. 102–105.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), pp. 96–99.
- ^ a b c d Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th century Scottish Gaelic Verse, p. 757.
- ^ Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th century Scottish Gaelic Verse, p. 758.
- ^ Ronald Black (1999), An Tuil: Anthology of 20th century Scottish Gaelic Verse, pp. 757–758.
- ^ Uys Krige monograph at Encyclopædia Britannica online
- ^ "Ian Hamilton Website: Anthologies Edited by Ian Hamilton". www.ianhamilton.org. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
- ^ "Alun Lewis". Channel 4. Archived from the original on 21 December 2007. Retrieved 7 January 2008.
- ^ Dana Gioia (2019), The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays, Wiseblood Books. pp. 77–99.
- ^ Scannell, Vernon Not Without Glory Woburn Press, London 1976 ISBN 0713000945
- ^ Gilroy, Harry. "Poets Honor Memory of Jarrell at Yale." The New York Times 1 March 1966.
- ^ e.g. translation by Jerome Rothenburg at poets.org website, accessed 1 July 2014
- ^ e.g. translation by Christopher Middleton at poets.org, accessed 1 July 2014.
- ^ "Paul Celan", in poets.org website, accessed 1 July 2014; Duroche (1967), p. 472.
- ^ Glenn (1972), p. 25.
- ^ a b Voices of Education, "WWII Japanese Poets"
- ^ Kumiko Kakehashi, So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War, p. xxv.
- ^ Kumiko Kakehashi, So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War, p. xxiii.
- ^ W. D. Ehrhart, The Madness of It All: Essays in War, Literature and American Life, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002) pp. 141–172.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), pp. 142–143.
- ^ Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Edited by Fred Macauley (1995), pp. 154–155.
- ^ Jacques, Rob (2017). War Poet. Sibling Rivalry Press. ISBN 978-1-943977-29-1.
- ^ Unaccustomed Mercy: Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War, edited by W. D. Ehrhart. (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 1989)
- ^ Lorraine Ash, A Poet Goes to War, 17 September 2006
- ^ Book Publisher's Site Info on Book
- ^ New Yorker Article
- ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCtZfBVS1Tg
- ^ "The BFI: Hedd Wyn (1992)". British Film Institute website. British Film Institute. 2017. Retrieved 5 January 2017.
- ^ "Death Comes for the War Poets" An Interview with Joseph Pearce
Bibliografía
- Ghosal, Sukriti. War Poetry – The New Sensibilities. Kindle Edition, 2015. ASIN: B00XH4O74Q.
- O'Prey, Paul (ed). First World War: Poems from the Front (Imperial War Museum, 2014) ISBN 9781904897880
- Roy, Pinaki. The Scarlet Critique: A Critical Anthology of War Poetry. New Delhi: Sarup Book Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2010. ISBN 978-81-7625-991-0.
- Ruzich, Constance. International Poetry of the First World War; An anthology of lost voices. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ISBN 978-1-3501-0644-4.
- Silkin, Jon. Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1972. Rpt. 1998. ISBN 978-0-312-21404-3.
enlaces externos
- BBudgen, David: Literature (Version 1.1), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
- Poetry of the Boer War, St Andrew's University [2]
- Japanese War poets [3]
- Potter, Jane: Literature (Great Britain and Ireland), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
- Whalan, Mark: Literature (USA), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
- A selection of Boer War poems [4]
- War Poems From Iraq
- War Poets Association
- The First World War Poetry Digital Archive
- Pro Patria (1917) by Philadelphia poet Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) pamphlet of poems in support of American involvement in WW1
- Dean F. Echenberg War Poetry Collection at the Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Over 7000 volumes of War Poetry
- Works written on the topic War poetry at Wikisource